I miss my car

I have officially gone almost eight months without having my car. Since I was sixteen I have always have the privilege of having my own car and the ability to travel anywhere I want when I want. I had put my trusty old car in the car of my parents since I was leaving and had no use for it while I was here. That does not mean I do not miss my car. I will give you a little perspective of what it is like to travel here. It is not nearly as easy as you would think it would be. For starters many people who live on my island have one family car. It would be all of my dads brothers sharing on pickup. You can imagine that my dads side of the family would not all fit in that one car. Then they go down what I call the chain of command. They first make sure that the older people in the family do not need the car for any reasons. After that they make sure the younger kids do not need the car because taking the kids on the bus would be quite the hassle.

            Lets just say that we were doing this in my family. I will make it simpler and just use my immediate family. I would have to check with my parents first to see if they needed the car if they did. I would be relying on the bus. If my parents decided to stay home I would now ask Jared since he is the oldest and also has kids. If they needed the car and had no room for me to tag along back to the bus I go. Lastly I would have to ask Derek if he needed the car and if he did back to the bus I go. Finally since I am last in line I could ask if I could use the car. So all in all getting a car here is quite a complicated process. Luckily when people have open space in their car and are driving past where you need to go they are more than willing to drop you off.

            All right so more than likely here we cannot find a ride and head for the bus stop. The bus is not always the most reliable since we are so far out on the island. On average we will wait about an hour for the bus to come. After an hour of waiting around hoping a bus will show up we hop on. It’s about a fifteen-mile drive to where we need to go and on average takes us about forty-five minutes on the bus to get there. Once we arrive at the market I usually only spend an hour of shopping and back to the bus stop we go. On Saturday we had a rare experience. We got to the bus stop and we saw some locals and were chatting with them. They told us that we need to get comfortable because they had been waiting for over an hour and a half the bus. For the fun of it I set my stopwatch to see how long we were going to have to wait. At the hour mark of waiting we asked a bus driver who doesn’t do our route to please give us a ride home. Thankfully we got home it was know 1:30 and we made it to the harbor. We left our house at eight and only did an hour of shopping.

            When we got back to the harbor it was now the waiting game of the boat. The coastguard just reinforced a law on our boats saying that each boat can only hold eight passengers. Usually we fit at least ten to fifteen people on these boats and now we are down to eight. We got up to harbor and waited our turn to hop on the boat and finally get home. Around 2:30 we finally made it home and all I could say is I miss my car. With the help of my car my day trip would have only taken me two hours I am guessing instead of six!