Elbow Cay, Bahamas

They sometimes ask how your family can live so far apart – Seattle and Minneapolis and Manhattan. Madrid and Brussels and Grenoble and Braunschweig. But a family far apart celebrates a reunion with a vengeance, and that makes up for it.

That furious reunion needs an antithesis, and that means a thick book. If anything, it’s a morning escape before brothers and sisters and cousins pour the first rums and tonics and grenadine. I picked up a copy of Desperate Journeys, Abandoned Souls - Edward E. Leslie’s healthy volume of true accounts of castaways. It looked thick, it looked long and it looked like a good place to get lost.

A shot of gold rum, a shot of coconut rum, a shot of triple sec, a squeeze of lemon and It's hard to get lost on this tiny island. It's hard to get lost on the islet of Elbow Cay - a six-mile length of Northern Bahamas sand. It is easy to get lost in a good book here. Leslie’s book is long and thoughtful accounts of survival and distant places. Genuine tales of castaways.

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There are dozens of articles in Notes from the Road that discuss the history of the Caribbean. Check out my article on Monkey River, Belize and the Zapatillas Cays, Panama.