The Monastery

While she was here, I tried to steer Georgia away from outings that required me to drive into the mountains. The thing I dislike most about Trinidad is driving here. The roads, especially the further you get away from the urban center, are narrow, poorly marked and poorly maintained which doesn't stop people from stopping effectively reducing a narrow two lane road into a very narrow one lane adventure. But everyone is aware of this and for the most part seems to have adopted a "If we slow down and drive courteously, we can all get through this with only a few fatalities" approach. Outside the big city, the drivers are actually pretty courteous.

I did let Georgia persuade me into an outing to the Mount St. Benedict Monastery. The other thing I love about driving here is what passes for directions. So the first step of an outing like this is going over the maps and the internet trying to figure out exactly where these destinations are. Sometimes you get lucky and the destination has a website with decent directions. Mount St Benedict has a web site and it does have a page called "Online Map" with the helpful heading "How to get here" and a Google map showing the alleged location of the monastery. I'm prepared to guarantee that no one yet has found the monastery from that map because it shows it on the island of Tobago rather than on Trinidad.

But with my new favorite site Wikimapia , I was able to figure out how to get there and so off we went.

The drive wasn't bad at all and the monastery was as nice as we thought it might be. The parking lot for the chapel is in fact on a terrific slope just like it looks. The monastery is located on top of one of the local mountains. If the road was maintained like many around here, it would have been a treacherous drive. But this one was well maintained and actually clearly marked.

And the view from the monastery was very nice. The town you see below is Tunapuna and my kids are lucky that they were born before I got here since this is one of my new favorite names. Don't you think Tunapuna Kimmel sounds nice?

Of course, being me, there was one thing I hadn't expected to see that caught my eye and tickled me at the same time. The local water system operates at a fairly low pressure and many people have these large black plastic storage vessels and pump the water up in their own homes to get the pressure they want. The monastery, being on top of a mountain, has the same problem but a bit more extreme because of the elevation. Of course, since it is a monastery... it's Holy Water in the convenient 400 gallon drum.