Harbour Lunch

While I abhor the possibility that Hilton Head Island could be characterized as a ghetto for Canadian tourists, I nonetheless appreciate that we were invited to join a knot of our compatriots for lunch today.  The seven of us congregated at the very popular “Crazy Crab” restaurant in Harbour Town.  For our part, we bicycled there from our nearby digs in Calibogue Cay, about a ten-minute hike.  The others motored from their place also in Sea Pines but further distant.

We all sat together at a long, heavy wooden table highly polished to a gloss, reminiscent of the traditional furnishings which are commonplace in Cape Cod.  Our dark blue face-cloth napkins complemented the look.  It was the measure of our delight being in one another’s company that even after the waitress had taken and delivered our drink orders no one had decided what to have for lunch.  The waitress abruptly interrupted our flow of conversation to press upon us the details of the daily specials.  Clearly our leisurely agenda did not correspond to her own. The table chatter continued, skipping lightly from one subject to another, music, books, real estate and travel.  Remarkably we avoided politics entirely.

At the termination of our lunch we succumbed to the usual need of tourists to take photos of the congregation.  We even enlisted the now defeated waitress to assist.  Outside the restaurant the photography continued, this time with the harbour yachts as a backdrop.  At last we parted company but only for a moment as we agreed to reconnect at our hosts’ digs oceanside.  Once there we languished on the deck overlooking the sea and the late afternoon sun on the surf and the beach.  We Canadians were a very long way from the cold and snow, blissful in the surrounding beauty of the Island.