Sounds ominous, doesn't it? :) It isn't nearly as bad when you recognize that there's a little township/district in West Bay called Hell. It even has it's own post office, which is pretty much a tourist trap. You can have your postcards postmarked in HELL. The post office has some PO boxes too. I looked into getting one last May when the other post offices were sold out and had a months long waiting list for one, plus they were ridiculously expensive. As if that wasn't enough, the Seven Mile Beach post office was wiped out in the hurricane, so everyone with an SMB PO Box has to go to the Airport Post Office and collect it there. Ay Carumba. There's also a couple gift shops there hawking everything from bumper stickers (Been to Hell and back, etc) t-shirts, coffee mugs and shot glasses to beach towels, postcards and videos.

It's history is pretty lame, too. About 100 years ago or so, some bigwig from the UK came out and was been shown around the island and was taken to this spot. Hell in fact is an odd outcropping of petrified coral (locally called Ironshore) well inland on the island, and gives you a reminder that this island just recently popped out of the ocean's surface probably after the last ice age or nearabouts then. Apparently the odd, black stalagmite (the ones that point up?) rock formations called to his mind descriptions of the Underworld when he was a child and remarked “My God, this place looks like Hell” and a tourist attraction was born.

This morning's detour through Hell was due to, once again, West Bay traffic. I woke up a few minutes before my alarm went off (again) and rather than put a pillow over my head and try to squeak out another few minutes of not-sleeping, I dragged my ass out of bed and hit the shower. After making sure Tweeter had enough food (that she's not REALLY eating anyway :;( ) and some fresh water/medicine in her other dish, I left the house at 0655 hoping to get in ahead of traffic.

Yesterday I was a smart-ass and tried to avoid traffic by going in LATER. I reasoned that if traffic was that backed up by 0700, that it must be almost done by 0900. Failing that, after 0900 I could turn left by Indies Suites (there's a sign that says no left turns 7am-9am) and scoot down the back road and cut a mile or so of traffic. I left the house at 0845 and promptly got stuck in traffic just as bad as if I had left at 0730. When I finally got to Indies Suites at 0925, there was a cop sitting there with his ticket book in his hands interrogating anyone who wanted to turn left there! There was another cop sitting in his car at the entrance to Governor's Harbour doing the same thing. :$ Instead of being out on the road making sure that people were moving along and not holding up traffic, they sat there on their upholstered seats to stop people from trying to AVOID the traffic. If ever the old adage “If you're not part of the solution, then you're part of the problem” ever applied, it was to that Police strategy. (evil)

The only difference was that at 0900 and beyond, the sun had crested the rooftops and what's left of the trees and beat down ferociously on my poor little jeep. It took me over an hour to get into work and left me a big sweaty mess before I even got to my desk. Ugh.

At 0652 this morning, I got to the tail end of traffic, about 1/4 mile down the road from my house. :$

I turned around, went back up the road past my house and turned right on Watercourse Road (The Crack Alley of West Bay) and then took a right up Hell Road. I scooted through the back of West Bay and came back to the main road at the intersection of Willie Farrington Road, near the grocery store. there was maybe 15 cars ahead of me on WF which was pretty good. At least when compared to the 80-odd cars and a 4-way stop that awaited me back the other way.

Traffic actually moved along fairly consistently today. I made it to Cafe Del Sol by about 0725. Thirty minutes to go about eight miles. Not bad, but still not very good. The only other thing I could have done was to go straight down Batabano road and then hung a right and traversed the dyke roads. I never went that way before, because dirt roads and a low-slung Acura didn't mix well, but now Im in a Jeep.

I've only been through the dyke roads once, a couple Sundays ago with Johnny Rotten and there's a few crossroads and forks in there, so I didn't want to go out there and get lost on my way to work. I'll wait til I've gone through there a couple times before trying to do it on my own. The other thing is that the dyke roads themselves are a bit perilous. it's about a 6 foot steep slope down to yucky water on either side of the road which is about 1.5x the width of an average car. I'd never go down there at night, unless I was in a VW Thing or some other “amphibious vehicle” just in case. Last year the Captain of one of the mega-yachts that was moored here and his girlfriend died when they failed to negotiate a curve on one of the dyke roads, and they rolled over into the swamp and drowned. Alcohol was a factor in the accident, but why take unneccessary chances?