Grand Cayman was in some ways one of the best days of my birthday vacation and in one way one of the worst days. So this day was my actual birthday. I work up relatively early as I almost always seem to when on a cruise, so I got up and wandered the ship for awhile.
I then went and had breakfast in the main dining room, and this time pressed for where I wanted to sit since it was my birthday. Serenade has about 5 windows in the downstairs of the main dining room that has concave windows. It really messes with the view of the water. So I first told the matre'd lady, who didn't understand enough English to understand what I was wanting. So she sent me over to the head waiter. He understood and lead me to an area of empty tables and said sit wherever you like. One of the best parts about this is that the rest of the week whenever we came to breakfast or lunch, this head waiter would repeat this of taking us to a general area of the dining area and saying sit wherever you like. This is really unheard of on a cruise ship main dining room so far as I've heard or experienced before. I loved it and tipped him well at the end of the week.
I enjoyed my breakfast and watching up pull into Grand Cayman, then got mom some breakfast on the way out. Our chosen tour for the day wasn't until the afternoon, so since we had started the charm bracelet thing we used the morning to go get the charms available on this island. The fun part was the charms represented what we had done last time on this island (a turtle), and what we had planned (a stingray). It was quite a walk to get the 2nd charm, but it was a nice day. At one point we saw these little lizards.
We then went back to the ship for a very quick lunch, and then back out to meet our tour. I don't really remember for sure which of the first 3 trips on the tender the following 4 pictures are from.
Next came probably the worst moment of this trip. I had been putting our kindles (in their waterproof cases) on the back of mom's wheelchair. I had noticed at one point that one of them was getting out of place, but at the time just didn't do anything about it. When we were getting on the van to go to the boat for the stingrays, I found that my kindle had gotten stuck between the wheel and the chair. So basically it was killed. I was really upset for quite awhile. Fortunately, I was about to have the most fun since we swam with dolphins last year.
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| Before pic |
One of the really nice things about this excursion was the boat. The stairs in the picture below lower down into the water, making it really fairly easy for mom to get off and on the boat.
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| Plus there always the surf I like. :-) |
Okay, so here's the "No, we weren't scared" and "No this wasn't dangerous." Steve the Crocodile Hunter died because he made stupid choices and he was really unlucky that one day. If you ever watched his show, you'd see him make stupid choices many times a show. Some of them just finally killed him. He jumped onto a stingray from the back in the same way their natural predators of sharks do. Their natural defense of sticking their barb straight happened to hit him in the most unlucky place of right through the main artery to his heart. Even still he may not have died had he not then pulled out the barb. All this they explained to us for those few who were nervous still. We actually were even able to touch the barb.
Okay rant/explanation over. This was so fun. These are just neat animals. We got to pet many of them, and try holding them. Mom was better and being calm around them, so she was better at holding them. If you were too scared or too excited, they would sense it and try to swim away. I was just having too much fun and so mostly they didn't like staying in my hands too long. One of the last things we did was to feed them bits of squid. It was so cool the way they vacuumed them out of your hand.
BTW, these pics are barely in any particular order. It was too hard to order them from between the two phones.
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| This was part of them demonstrating how safe these animals were. |
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| This is one of my favorites of mom |
One of the tour operators took these pictures. And while he unfortunately cut off my head, you can still see the joy on my face.
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| Like I said, I was too excited so they'd swim away. |
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| Out of focus, and head chopped off, and it's still one of my faves |
One of the operators told us how they could sense your heart rate through the same thing in their snout that also lets them sense the food in the sand. Thus they could hold the rays for a long time by keeping their heart rates low. The rays actually liked to center their snouts over the heart of a calm person.
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| Mom was working hard here at keeping her heart rate low so it would stay on her, and it stayed on her at least two minutes. |
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| Another of my favorites of myself on this trip |
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| I love this picture for it really shows how big some of the rays were. |
So while I swore after breaking my Kindle that I never wanted to come back to Grand Cayman (last year this was where we lost a bag), I no longer felt the need to stick to that negative declaration after this really great fun.
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| Just loved this view on the way back |
We were on the last tender to go back to the ship. For a later tour, we always book through the ship. That way if it runs late, they will wait for you. This one wasn't late at all compared to the one on my first cruise, but it was right up against the all aboard time.
After we were on-board we went back to the room to get ready for our early dinner time this night. I wanted to have dinner so we could watch the ocean out the windows during my birthday dinner. We then rushed to go to the spa for the massage taster demo. We ended up being the only two people at it. So she did a short explanation of all the types, and a short demo of many of the massage types on us. I was surprised to find I actually liked the one that was done with these bamboo sticks. I'd often seen it as a special on one day of a cruise, but just couldn't see why it'd be good. All of it was really fun though.
We then went to dinner. The dinner as it was on the menu was just a strange combination of one good type of beef and one tough dried out piece of pork. So I made my own dinner combination of two of the crab cake appetizers, and two of the good pieces of beef. It was really yummy. After dinner, Amelia took the red velvet cupcakes I had order and put candles in all of them. They then gathered all our waitstaff along with one who they said was their best singer and sang happy birthday to me.
After some stops for pictures, we then went to the comedian headliner show for the night, Lucas Bohn. He was funny and someone I know we've watched on TV at least once before. We were really tired though from the stingray excursion (it was work to stay in mostly one place on the sandbar) so we went back to the room and bed after the show.
