I wanted to get outside for a walk. Just around the block. A month earlier I'd been in Antarctica. My knees complained though.

At 9pm in San Francisco, I somehow ended up buying a ticket to Saint Lucia, a small island in the Caribbean. Once that decision had been made, I immediately posted a question in the WhatsApp group for the Travelers' Century Club.

The first thing I did after my plane landed in Saint Lucia was ask Jaden, the young man pushing my wheelchair, to teach me some Creole. “Saint Lucian Creole,” he corrected, with a grin. “We have our own.”

Yesterday was supposed to be a workday. I was in my apartment outside Castries, spending the morning working with coaching clients by phone and catching up on the unglamorous but necessary details of running a private practice while traveling through the Caribbean.

As I stepped off the ferry in Martinique, I could immediately feel the difference from Saint Lucia. In Saint Lucia, people spoke English. In Martinique, French. In Saint Lucia, they drove on the left. In Martinique, on the right.

Arriving from Dominica, I stepped off the ferry in Guadeloupe and suddenly—voilà—I was back in France. Guadeloupe, like Martinique, isn’t merely a French territory. It is an overseas region of France, with the same status as the mainland.

I had dreamed of visiting South Beach for years. I’d planned to spend a whole week there after six weeks traveling through the Caribbean—Saint Lucia, Martinique, Dominica, and Guadeloupe—before flying home to San Francisco.