Trinidad: The Layover

I've never been much of a pill-popper. I've always preferred to tough out the pain, or keep my senses about me during times of stress and strain. For that reason, I hate red-eye flights because I always arrive at my destination in terrible shape – exhausted and glassy-eyed with little energy to do my work. Last night, however, I decided to take something to put me out during our overnight flight to Miami and it was the best decision I could have made. I was dreading the trip to Guyana, with a four hour layover in Miami, a three hour flight to Trinidad, and another six hour layover on the island before we take off for Georgetown. I slept the whole way to Miami, however, and then conked out again on the flight to Trinidad. I'm feeling great at the moment. The mountains of Trinidad are visible from the the edge of the airport and they look rather mysterious – as if there's something secretive going on within them.

Since we had so much time to kill before our final leg, we decided to walk out of the airport and down the road to where we heard there was some killer Trinidadian street food. We're here with Roger and Mollie from the Henry Wine Group, California's distributor for El Dorado, and we all decided that the double stand was the way to go. A "double" seems to be the hot snack in Port of Spain, as there was a line of locals waiting their turn at the stand. Hanif's little operation consists of taking two fresh pieces of roti Indian-style bread (hence the term "double"), dumping in a spoonful of curried garbanzo beans, then topping them with a cucumber slaw and both a sweet and spicy salsa. He then flips the bread and twirls the sandwich into paper, as you can see sitting on the counter in the above photo.

There are different types of bread as well. Once of them is stuffed with potatoes. Yum. 

Now we're sitting in the VIP lounge at the airport, enjoying our first chance at WiFi and some Angostura Trinidadian Rum (Mollie somehow had free passes for all four of us!). We've got a few more hours to kill until we board the last flight in our long journey to Guyana. So far it's been an easy trip. I'm very, very relieved.

-David Driscoll