By Richard Piersol From JournalStar

Les Pitons dominate the skyline along the southwestern coast of St. Lucia in the West Indies. The volcanic peaks rise 2,618 and 2,438 feet above the Atlantic Ocean.

January 01, 2015 2:00 pm / Column3

St. Lucia, in the Windward Islands, looks like the Caribbean should — still kind of wild, like someplace a pirate could hide out.

Les Pitons, two volcanic peaks, leap from the sea. More than 2,000 feet high, they are cloaked in rain forest and tower over more rainbows than you are likely to see in one place anywhere else.

The island generously offered that rare traveler’s joy, an obscure place that’s far better than you imagined. My wife, Rhonda Winchell, and I climbed the Tet Paul Nature Trail overlooking the magnificent volcanic spires on the sea, and the verdant farmland tended by our guide and host, John Nestor, and others of his community.

He worked for more than a decade to help get this trail established as a local tourist attraction, a little more out of the way than many travelers are willing to go. It’s the kind of place Rhonda always finds rummaging through the Internet before a trip.

And it was a memorable, euphoric climb up the slopes through exotic vegetation to stand atop its “Stairway to Heaven,” not much of an exaggeration given the views.

After a plunge into the crystal-clear sea at one of the local public beaches, happily shared with one of the most exclusive resorts in the Caribbean, we rode over the mountain roads with John late in the afternoon to the capital of Castries and our Oceania cruise ship, the Insignia.

There, hot, tired and still wearing swimming suits, we were stunned to find out what we’d missed. Less than an hour after we left the ship in the morning, a fire in the engine room killed three people who worked there.

Almost all of the 656 passengers and 400 crew members had been evacuated to a ferry terminal for most of the day. The ship, built in 1998, had undergone a $50 million refurbishing earlier this year. Oceania, acquired just weeks earlier by Norwegian Cruise Line, was sorting out what to do with 1,000 people on an island ill-equipped to accommodate them under the circumstances.

In the ferry terminal, we immediately encountered the peculiar dynamics of people under stress in unusual circumstances. Most of the passengers were older (and we’re no spring chickens) and clearly not accustomed to being inconvenienced, much less confined.

There was plenty of water and food, sandwiches from a nearby cruise ship competitor, fresh bread and rolls from the Insignia’s bakery. The terminal had a lot of seating, not enough for everyone, but lots of people were inclined to pace, anyway. Big fans cooled things off.

Three people were dead, but you’d have thought the bigger pain was not having access to one’s car keys or costume jewelry. Dark, unsubstantiated comments about the cruise estimated the stakes of what a lawyer friend of mine calls “jackpot justice.”

Hours went by as one rumor after another arose spontaneously, circulated and died.

Finally, the ship’s manager announced we would be flown to Miami — where our half-finished 10-day cruise was supposed to end anyway — in six chartered aircraft, one at a time, through the night.

We could not, however, reboard the ship to get our luggage. Crew members would go aboard and recover whatever we had stored in the stateroom safes and any prescription medications, which, for this crowd, was a lot. A few of our number had already left the terminal in ambulances despite the attention of the ship’s doctor and volunteers, including a couple of nurses who were among the passengers.

So for the next several hours, way beyond the schedule originally announced, scores of people at a time loaded into buses, left and stopped for another hour or two by the ship, where crew members and the ship’s entertainers took down orders for prescription drugs and valuables.

That, of course, led to anguish over all sorts of “missing” jewelry and money and more speculation on eventual court-ordered compensation. We would see our luggage someday, we were assured. Our fare would be refunded. We would get a discount on a future cruise.

Our bus was not the last to go, but given the fussing at the ship it was the last to arrive at St. Lucia’s international airport — at 4 in the morning, after an hour on some unpaved mountain roads that were a lot more fun the day earlier.

Nobody from the cruise company met or accompanied our group as we boarded one airplane, sat for an hour, then were taken off to board another, where we sat for the next four hours. The World Atlantic charter crew was as accommodating as could be, serving us cheese and salami and crackers and pop.

As it turned out, our flight was delayed until 9 a.m. by either U.S. Customs in Miami, according to World Atlantic, whose crew said the flight manifest had not been reconciled, or, as Oceania told us later, the World Atlantic pilot who inexplicably refused to allow an Oceania representative aboard the flight.

Goat rodeo, or snafu, take your pick.

After a 3½-hour, 2,100-mile flight, we touched down at Miami International Airport.

I thought it a remarkable achievement to have evacuated 1,000 people from a remote corner of the Caribbean in just over 24 hours after an accident disabled the ship.

But we still faced U.S. Customs in Miami, or, as some travelers recognize it, Dante’s Tenth Circle of Hell.

This was going to be tricky. We were about 29 Americans and one Australian — Lorna, an elderly woman who sat beside Rhonda on the plane. Lorna told the remarkable tale of having been deliberately separated from her daughter by Oceania staff at the buses because she hadn’t shared a cabin on the ship with her daughter and her daughter’s companion.

She was adrift, alone, exhausted, not well, not very mobile and confused about this procedure, which was getting uglier by the minute. Lorna had to enter the “Visitors” queue at Customs, all by herself, but Rhonda assured her we’d see her on the other end.

Finally, an Oceania rep joined us after we entered the U.S. residents’ customs line, where I enjoyed sparring with high-handed, rude and unhelpful customs personnel who didn’t want to hear Rhonda’s pleas to help Lorna get through the Tenth Circle.

“Not my job,” one actually said.

Oceania’s upstream executives — not for long, given the Norwegian acquisition — greeted us at the back end of customs, apologized profusely for the tragedy, trouble and inconvenience and hurried us to a bus.

There, Rhonda made her stand. She was getting off the damned bus and wasn’t moving until somebody went back and fetched Lorna. The executives finally grasped, as nobody else from Oceania did until then, what was at stake: One of their most vulnerable passengers, among hundreds, was marooned, unaccounted for in customs, and would probably not be coming out any time soon.

They reacted quickly and recovered Lorna, weeping, frightened and lost.

Our bus having already left, Lorna happily rejoined Rhonda and me in a crackerjack limousine, which took us to the Ritz Carlton in Key Biscayne. Later that day, Lorna’s daughter joined her.

Given the Ritz gift shop’s limited and pricey selection, Rhonda and I took a cab the next day to a Target, where we bought clothes appropriate to the Nebraska weather for which we were destined. We enjoyed the Ritz’s hospitality on Oceania and flew home the next morning.

Our luggage arrived two weeks later, minus my Panama hat.

So far as we can find, nobody has disclosed or published the names of the three people who died.

St. Lucia Richard _Piersol_.jpg Courtesy Photo

For more on this story go to: http://journalstar.com/lifestyles/leisure/deadly-fire-turns-lincoln-couple-s-cruise-into-logistical-nightmare/article_9b274d60-fcaa-5963-9eca-c6da608eec9e.html