Welcome to Sunday

              We all knew it was coming.  It was inevitable, only a matter of time before this was brought up on us.  Naturally, I speak of the International Cultural Festival (aka. beer festival) as well as the calendar change from the hash coming on Monday to the hash taking place on Sundays.  Normally, the Sunday time slot is 4:00 in the afternoon but for this inaugural Sunday run we went with 11:00 am to allow for enough time at the Cultural Festival afterwards.

            Richard set this week’s run and wisely it was set to start from the parking lot of the Botanic Gardens where the festival was being held.  We waited and waited but it would turn out to be a somewhat small crowd that day – perhaps put off by the blazing sun shining from an almost cloudless sky.  Either way, we pulled together enough hashers to make a respectable pack and set off on Dunmore Drive towards Bay Street where a check-in sent us in three different directions, the correct one ultimately heading across the street to Arawak Cay.  The trail ran straight past the barricade and over the bridge where the paths became much less inhabited and a check-in sent us heading west along a mostly deserted road.  This portion of the trail seemed to stretch on for an eternity and it was with great relief that we finally found a box where the road came to an end.

            After we all arrived, we had to backtrack to the next check-in which had no direction indicators so we wandered around looking for the trail when Richard kindly pointed us in the proper direction.  From there, the trail went through the path of quite a bit of scrubland that required some careful negotiation of terrain and some hawk-like eyes to follow the flour properly.  Any other pack of hashers would have surely fallen in their attempts to discern the proper trail but this group managed their way through the difficult course and eventually came upon the next box at the base of a single tree that offered but a small amount of shade from the sun that continued to bet down with a fierce intensity.

            The fake camera clicked and again we were on the road, heading back towards the bridge that took us onto this small island until the trail took a curve towards the left and put us on a road parallel to the line of restaurants at Arawak.  This road curved to the right and took us over the bridge where a check in sent us in three different directions – towards Bay, through Arawak Cay, along the beach – and the trail naturally followed along the beach, the only direction that took us farther away from the end of the trail.  We followed the sidewalk of the esplanade about half of the way down before coming to the third box of the trail.  We lingered at this box a bit longer as there was much more shade and a breeze coming off the water that made the spot quite enjoyable.  Two paths shot off here, one heading towards downtown and the other heading over towards Bay, one of the two seeming much more likely than the other and in fact this was the case.  The trail cut across Bay and up into the parking lot of the park, which was where we found the On-In marker.  From here it was a straight shot across the dirt track and the cricket field back to the end of the trail where we found a parking lot much more full of people heading inside tot he International Cultural Festival.