Cruise, Part 3

Hooray, Grand Cayman! For this stop, we had to take tenders, or smaller boats, between our ship and the dock because of the shallow waters.

I didn't enjoy this stop as much as the other two, it felt like a white people tax haven. It's a tax free territory of the United Kingdom, so they have a queen-appointed governor. We could start taking tenders at 7am, and our excursion started at 8:45am. We shuffled into a huge long line that was heading towards five or six buses. There were 21 seats on the bus, and we were numbers 21 and 22, so I had to sit in a jump seat, unable to sit with husband and having to prop myself up because there was no armrest or really floorspace for my feet. I had to be the first off and the last on at each stop, and though we were trying really hard to stick to the schedule, no one else seemed to understand that we had a timetable to keep and kept taking forever. After the first stop, we tried to trade seats, but the people who had been in those seats complained to the driver, and they made him switch us back. Unlike our driver in Jamaica, who was ready to talk about anything you wanted to ask about, and had tons of colloquial information and would get real if you wanted, the driver for this excursion shrugged off any questions I asked about politics or the history of very specific, what sounded like scripted topics. That having been said, the island is beautiful and we did a few really cool things, like the iguanas and wild chickens running around everywhere.

The first stop was a semisubmersible called the Nautilus that covered a bunch of territory of the area around where our ship was docked. There were two big shipwrecks to see, the Cali and the Barboa, and a whole lot of different fish. Mostly we saw tarpon, sergeants, angelfish, parrotfish, and coral, but I also saw some kind of shrimp, a puffer, a couple of turtles, and a moon jellyfish.

Next we were off to Hell, which is just a little rock formation. We got our passports stamped and sent my in-laws a postcard postmarked from there. It was a really weird place that was just a little shop and two decks to overlook the rocks. There wasn't really any real information given to us about what type of rocks they were, or anything.

We then headed to a gift shop where they had rum cake, keychains, coffees, shot glasses, mugs, and tourist junk. We bought some coffee and a shot glass, and headed out back to look into the tide pools. It was so pretty, but it was hard for me to focus because I was so mad at the other people on the bus, and frustrated at the lack of real information about what we were doing.

The next stop was the turtle farm/rescue/park. The goal of the park is to educate, encourage preservation, and care for the reproduction of the endangered turtles. They had several tanks that housed turtles at different age levels, had time out tanks for cantankerous ones that didn't want to get along with one another, and a huge laying beach where all the females could lay their eggs in peace.

We got to hold some juveniles, and they slapped our hands with their flippers really hard, but would calm down if you stroked them under the chin. It's a well known fact that turtles are jerks, but husband was trying to convince me otherwise.

On our way back into town, we went through a bunch of corporate sponsored roundabouts. Once we got off the bus, we went into the port area and I realized I'd lost my phone. This was really upsetting and we were both disappointed and mad, on top of the frustration from the other people on the bus. We both ran back to the bus to look around on the floor in case it'd fallen out of my pocket, but no luck. We decided to stop and get something to eat, so we got an appetizer plate at a touristy restaurant that had the best conch fritters I'd had all trip, it had mirepoix in it, unlike the others, and had a less voluminous batter so you could really taste the conch. It was tasty, but we were both still upset.

We decided to look for a phone to call the turtle place to see if anyone had turned in the phone, when a pickup truck screeched to a halt next to where we were walking on the sidewalk, and a guy jumped out asking if we were the Rossettos. His name was Waldo, he was with port authority, and he'd found my phone. He called the last person I'd been texting with from his own phone (I had no service), who happened to be my friend Alex who was also our travel agent for this trip. There was really no one better for him to have called, since she had all our booking information. Such luck! He turned in the phone to ship security, and they'd decided to drive around a bit to see if they could find us, and he recognized my shirt from the last couple of photos. We were so relieved, I was crying and we were just a mess.

Basically, we were just ready to be done with the day at this point. We headed back to the ship, stopping with ship security on the way to grab my phone, and took a couple more photos.

Once back on the ship, we headed up to the pool since we were still about two hours from leaving port and everyone was still on land. We went to the main show in the theatre that night, it was called Win! and was a weird combination of a bunch of different game shows. After heading to the seated dinner, we went to the 18+ comedy show, which was okay. It was the second cruise elegant night, so we were dressed up again, and we purchased a photo they had taken this night, to frame when we got home.