Entries Tagged 'travel' ↓

Because it’s when I blog!

Oh, okay. We eat dinner too. Tonight we go to a special pirate-themed dinner here at the hotel. There’s a good buffet, a band that plays quite well, and a fire-eater who was not spectacular, but who was very picturesque.

Once all that is over, they hold a limbo contest. And guess what - Kate wins!

Now that girl can limbo…

Her prize is two tickets for the hotel’s barbeque party tomorrow night. Which I guess means that I have to buy three more tickets for that party.

I get back from diving at noon and meet up with everyone. We go out for some Mongolian barbeque for lunch (yum!). Then a couple hours shopping in town, followed by some snorkeling with Kate. A fine afternoon! Here’s some pictures:

Some of the ships in Georgetown harbor:

One of the shops we visited:

Kate and Diana getting eaten by landsharks. (Landsharks are a major problem in these parts.)

Kate, snorkeling. (She managed to recover from the landshark attack.)

Me snorkeling.  Note the water-level in my snorkel.  This is the worst snorkel we have - Kate grabbed it when we went down, so naturally I let her have the good one.  I’m lucky I didn’t drown.

Our resort, from where we were snorkeling. (We went out pretty far.)

It looks like I’m going to be settling into a simple pattern. The morning is my time - the kids all sleep late anyway, so I’m free to go off and have my little adventures. In this case, my little adventures consist primarily of scuba diving. That’s one of the main reasons we came here, to the Caymans - it’s a world-renowned scuba destination. So I get down to the lobby by 7:30, meet with my dive operators, and am soon off diving.

The diving is fun, though I don’t see anything fantastic. A rather large green eel (The thing about eels is how they feels), a few turtles, an anchor from the days when the Spaniards ruled these waters. But hey - a nondescript day diving is better than a good day doing just about anything else in my book, so it qualifies as a great morning.

Here’s a few pictures, from the boat ride out and the first dive. My batteries died before the second dive, so alas - no pictures of Spanish anchors.

I’m sitting in the Marriott Beach Resort in Grand Cayman. We’re spending the week here. I do love the tropics, and I have rarely so needed some time to relax, to float in the water and let the world spin on its own for a while.

Nothing much to tell of our flight. We got on the plane, we got off the plane. We got on another plane, we got off that plane. We’re here now.

I’ve already gone snorkeling. There’s a nice bit of reef off the hotel’s beach. Lots of spiny sea urchins, lots of Caribbean-style fish, a couple of anemones, one rather large conch. Plenty of cool reef to explore.

Tomorrow morning I’m going scuba diving. Yay scuba!

We dined at Coconut Joe’s. Quite nice, dining outside under a large tree with a bunch of chickens running around. The girls got a big kick out of feeding lettuce to the chickens, and the chickens seemed to enjoy it also.

Overall, I’ve never been to any foreign country that felt so much like America. The main drag has every American fast-food restaurant imaginable - including two Burger Kings. Julie and I went to a supermarket that would have felt natural in some strip mall in the states. There’s Christmas lights everywhere. And the people we meet are the typical global mix that you’d expect in any US city. Lots of Caribbean natives, sure, but also lots of Americans, Eastern Europeans, English, and miscellaneous. (No doubt brought here by the prospect of working a menial job in paradise. Hey, if you’ve got to be a waitress in a hole in the wall dive, might as well be at a dive that’s across the street from one of the world’s great beaches.)

I’ll fill you all in on the day-to-day activities. For now, time to sleep.