Little Spark in Barbados

There's nothing like motoring through the countryside of a foreign land with a police van filling the rearview mirror of your rental car for what seems an eternity.

"Don't look guilty by being too perfect," my wife, Lisa, advises. Of course the fact I was driving a right-hand drive car on the "wrong" side of the road made me even more careful. What had I done to attract this?

The temporary driver's license the polite agent at the airport rental car office provided was in order. But why had the Drive-A-Matic rental dude been so intent on drilling the fact that, although the car was insured, the wheels and tires were my responsibility. I even had to sign a document attesting I understood.

Perhaps the six-pack of police tailing our white, subcompact Chevrolet Spark were wheel-and-tire investigators who had heard that I scraped a curb. In my mind it was not a question of if we would be pulled over, but when.

"There really is nothing to worry about. We're not planning to overthrow the government and we don't have a trunk full of contraband," I laughed, pushing the Spark into fifth gear, a rare occurrence on the low and meandering country roads.

As the road wound through tidy villages and fields of lanky sugar cane, our shadow hung in like a recurring nightmare until traffic got between us at an awkward three-way stop.

Free of our tail, we eventually turned down a gravel lane to an abandoned lighthouse. A pallet of turquoise, green and blue surf crashed onto the cliffs below in aquatic turmoil that was a pittance compared to the turmoil in my stomach when the police van rolled up beside our rental car. The big Nissan people-mover dwarfed the perky little Spark.

A plain-clothes officer approached, wearing a T-shirt.

"American? Canadian? You going to take a rock home with you for a souvenir?"

"Ahhh, No! Err yes, I mean no," I stammered, wondering if this was some sort of trick question.

"Welcome to Barbados!" The constable smiled widely, looking like an ad in a glossy tourism brochure.

I've never been big on the Caribbean island resort holiday concept where you wing into paradise, get corralled onto a cheery bus that transports a load of pasty northerners to an over-the-top resort to hang out with a posse of cold weather escapees. My idea of cruising the Caribbean is exactly that, cruising. The four-wheeled variety though, with a rental car, road map and guidebook at my beck and call.

And we recently did just that, booked airline tickets to Barbados but instead of an "all-inclusive" resort, we reserved a rental car and our first two nights' accommodations only. We would wing it the other two nights on the 166 square-mile island that sits at the southeast end of the Caribbean Islands.

During the flight, it was the rental car that piqued my excitement. I knew it would be a right-hand drive vehicle, a holdover from Barbados' 340 years under British rule before independence in 1966. But what would it be? I thought a Toyota or Hyundai but was surprised when the agent at Drive-A-Matic tossed me the keys to a Chevrolet Spark, a compact three-cylinder runabout that will debut in Canada as a 2012 model. Cute, functional and agile was the ticket for Barbados roads and in a few minutes, Lisa and I were running the roundabouts on the way to the hotel.

The ocean was lapping the beach right outside the window of our basic three-star room the next morning and while Lisa took in Worthing Beach, I puttered around the area in the Spark, getting used to driving on the left and shifting gears with my left hand.

I picked Lisa up and took a six-hour orientation spin around the island. We were like a couple of puppies checking out new digs, as a paradise slipped by the windshield of our tiny Chevy Spark.

Over the course of the next few days, between the wild, windy North Point, the rugged, remote east coast and the flatlands of the south, we dined on fresh flying fish and macaroni pie at roadside diners, circled the island a few times and met some very friendly Barbadians. The road signs, especially on the pristine east coast, were scarce but it was impossible to get lost because the friendly locals all speak English. Our night under a mosquito net at the funky Sea-U Guesthouse in Tent Bay on the east coast scored big on the romance dial, too.

On the last night, we booked a resort hotel on the west coast, a world apart from the craggy wind-swept Atlantic shores. We spent the night bar hopping on Second Street in Holetown ending up at Lexy Piano Bar, fully entertained into the early hours of the morning by Frankie G from Tennessee.

The next morning we packed up for the last time and motored back to the airport. There were no police vans in hot pursuit and we passed wheel-and-tire inspection at Drive-A-Matic. Our activity-packed four days had seemed like four weeks.

Lisa and I both came away with a head full of warm memories that will make us smile for a long time and I got a dose of Caribbean cruising thanks to the little Chevy Spark.

Garry Sowerby, author of "Sowerby's Road: Adventures of a Driven Mind," is a four-time Guinness World Record holder for long-distance driving. His exploits, good, bad and just plain harrowing, are the subject of World Odyssey, produced in conjunction with Wheelbase Media. You can send Garry a note online at www.wheelbase.ws/media.