Welcome to our little island network™ In case we have not yet  had the chance to meet, my name is  John Ingram and I have lived here on tiny, isolated and beautiful Carriacou Island since 1991. The goal of our little island network™  >> is to try and keep our local guesthouse rooms and other tourism services more often booked than empty;  >> to attempt to help my neighbors and friends who own and manage the tourism businesses here in The Grenadines turn their expenditures building the tourism infrastructure into an investment that pays off with a better life for themselves and their families;  >> To help them help themselves in the hope that the island youth will choose to remain here rather than going off to Brooklyn, Toronto and London just as soon as they can get a visa, often never to return until retirement age. We must be doing something right since traffic to the web site has now grown  to between 10-15,000 hits each and every day producing most days 50 e-mail messages from real people  just like you with a wish to visit The Grenadines.  These hits have turned into  over 10,000 nights confirmed  at our hotels, dive shops, and yachts  ~ which brought business to our buses, taxis, restaurants, supermarkets, and.... Our site has been recognized by Internet Search Engines as this region's BEST Internet Travel Destination Guide Google   Yahoo!   MSN  Open Directory  Alta Vista and others, send us visitors interested in information on The Grenadine Islands. ~ I have now been living on Carriacou since 1991 and I am proud to be able to produce and maintain this project aimed at National Development. Carriacou is my home and I am happy to contribute to its sustainable development... one room at a time. ~ It all began on 11 November 1991...  when I first landed at Carriacou's Lauriston International Airport. Looking back over the years I still laugh when seeing the word International associated with a landing strip with a fence and a gate that goes up and down when planes land and take-off. The gate normally would remain unnoteworthy except that the island's main connecting road from Hillsborough to Tyrrel Bay ~ the two main towns on the island ~ passes through these gates and across the runway (usually when planes are not landing.)   I was told that the most recent renovation included lights for night landings but an insurance/liability issue limits us 'till now to daytime landings only. Back to November 1991, as I recall, one of Airline of Carriacou's little mosquito sized planes had buzzed its merry way just below the clouds above Grenada and then the channel until about 20 minutes after take-off I saw Carriacou for the very first time... ... An emerald isle surrounded by crystal clear blue water with wide, sandy beaches ... everywhere! The mosquito landed safely and came to a halt outside the tiny terminal and I was home. Bus drivers on Carriacou are called taxis and three or four of them in their buses and small pick-up trucks seem always to be waiting when planes arrive at the Airport from Grenada, Union Island, and Barbados. "Need a Taxi?" I hear and I accept the offer from Luxin' Lennox who tosses my 85 pound Samsonite into the back of his pick-up with hardly a grunt and asks me "Where 'ya goin to?""Need a place to stay," I begin as Lennox heads toward Tyrrel Bay and my rendezvous with 'The Mighty Scraper.' Scraper is nowhere to be found so Luxin' Lennox heads back toward the Airport and on to Hillsborough. My mouth drops open as the taxi rounds the corner from the Airport and Hillsborough Bay comes into view. It has the same effect today. Blazing white sandy beach going on for miles framed with what must be a million coconut palms. I couldn't decide what to drink with my eyes first... the beach.. the blue water.. the puffy white clouds.. the Sandy Island just off shore.. or... those fantastic coconut palms grouped endlessly in a grove that was split by the road Luxin' Lennox was roaring down talking a mile a minute about something I don't really remember. Luxin' Lennox informs me that we will find Scraper later but just in case, let's look at some other possible places to stay. All are small and very rustic. But just look at that view! I end up back on Tyrrel Bay and 'The Mighty Scraper'  rents me one of his little beach front cottages for 30 days. I settle-in and end-up sitting on the front porch, feet raised, watching everything and everyone that passes by (but not nearly as well as they were watching me.) With me on the porch was my Taiwan Toshiba clone notebook computer (80386 8 MB RAM, 200 MB HDD) and my Bubble Jet printer. I was just beginning to wade through CorelDRAW! so I could finally write THE BOOK. Ever since Prof. Paul A. Atkins, my advisor at Journalism School, had worked to educate me at West Virginia University, I had known that someday I was going to write THE BOOK (otherwise Miss Satterfield's English Courses would have gone wasted.)   Little Carriacou Island seemed just the place get started. "Come on in the Gate," I shouted to Scraper "I'm just playing around." Scraper was curious and asked me, "Can you make me a menu with that 'ting, mon?" I had never tried but with 4 hours of intensive CorelDRAW! learning behind me, I told Scraper, "Sure thing!" I still have that original file for Scraper's menu on my hard disk though in all honesty it does not shine brightly as one of my best but a few days later came another man to my front porch who said "Scraper say you make menu for him with dat. You make one for me, too?" And with that JOHN'S PRINT SHOP was born. As the 2007-2008 Season is next to begin, over 450 people and businesses throughout The Grenadine Islands now are members of our Grenadines.Net Family. Grenadines.net was responsible for making travel arrangements for nearly 10,000 overnights - one room at a time.  Since 1991, the number of graphic files and computer data stored has grown to over 200MB and into the most complete, commercial directory of tourism services and providers located in The Grenadine Islands of Carriacou, Petite Martinique, Palm, Union, Mayreau and The Tobago Cays, Canouan, Mustique and Bequia. When I arrived on Carriacou menus were written on the back of paper bags if at all and today even the buses have business cards. I created a market for my desktop publishing services and now I am using this customer base to build our little island network™ In June 1999  we added our CARRIACOU INTERNET CAFÉ and now we offer a central location to socialize, to use the computers, to surf the web, to plug-in, to watch TV from our selection of 35 cable channels, to relax or read a book or make a paperback exchange, to 'take the breeze' from our back porch, and to enjoy the cold drinks, local beer, and icy juices. In 1996 the local telephone company had a workshop at Kim-D-King's Dynasty Club. Along with punch and sandwiches catered by Esther Henry-Fleary, a briefing was given on our new (and only) Internet ISP allowing us access to the internet with a local dail-up number. A pre-release version of http://www.grenadines.net was born as soon as I could get down to the telephone company and sign-up. After a brief period of hosting my web site files with the phone company, and after having done more than a little bit of research while surfing the world wide web, I contracted with a company in Massachusetts to store my files on a virtual server located just north of Boston. John "The Printer" had just taken on a new hat as webmasterJOHN@grenadines.net Then the work began transferring all the graphic files previously used for printing on paper into electronic pages published to the internet. As time passes and the locals become more knowledgeable about the power of the internet to bring tourists, these initial graphics are turning into full scale web pages with interesting stories about the owners, photographs and sound. For this reason I sometimes start a web page with UNDER CONSTRUCTION for as in a new house, it and Grenadines.Net will hopefully never be completed but will continue to grow into an electronic travel magazine about The Grenadine Islands of Carriacou, Petite Martinique, Palm, Union, Mayreau and The Tobago Cays, Canouan, Mustique and Bequia. Grenadines.net  Your Information Gateway to  The Grenadine Islands