Its 7:30 in the morning of Friday, September 11, 2009. The Amtrak dining car smells of french toast and scrambled eggs. The sun is just above the horizon in the Jacksonville, Florida area when Miss Gwen Turner breaks her silence to tell me that she has a three year old great grandson in the area that she has never met. Her schedule is such that she will not have the time to stop and spend some time with him. As the train continues to move south, she waves out the window to an imaginary grandson, “See you when you’re five, if I’m still around.” Miss Turner’s home for the last forty years has been St. Croix in the U.S. Virgin Islands. The New York native and mother of two first paid a visit to the Virgin Islands in 1969 and never left. “I went to see a friend in St. Thomas and she suggested I move there. I wasn’t crazy about St. Thomas, but fell in love with St. Croix. She reminded me that Hess Oil was hiring in St. Croix and that I could probably get a job with them.” The rest is history. Miss Turner came stateside in May and spent the summer visiting with her son, a school teacher in Middletown, New York and her daughter in the Pennsylvania Pocono Mountains. With the exception of a small puddle jumper plane from St. Croix to St. Thomas, Miss Turner’s journey was a true seatrain. She left St. Thomas in late spring via Carnival Cruise Lines to Cape Canaveral. Upon her arrival on the mainland, she reserved a sleeper car on Amtrak’s Silver Star. She found her dinner of chicken curry most disagreeable. She expected a more robust dark curry native to her adopted island home and the tame Amtrak version left something to be desired. Now she is on her way home, boarding a Carnival ship on the morning of Saturday, September 12th. She’s decided not to travel for a while, the rainy summer in the Northeast left her longing for her tropical homestead. Godspeed Miss Turner.
