Late Sleepers
Since our tour was cancelled we could sleep in for a bit since we now didn’t have any reason to get ashore at any particular time.
One of the down sides of a Grand World Voyage is that 80% of the ship is 4 star mariner or higher which means that priority tendering is basically meaningless. Tender tickets would be available at the wine bar starting around 10 AM.
The weather was lousy which made it even easier to not try and get ashore early. We were hoping that it would clear a little later in the day, but it would stay cloudy with sporadic rain showers during our entire visit.
When everyone has priority – No one has priority
Tendering started at 10:00 but around 10:15 or so we were notified that one of the tenders broke down requiring people to get off that tender and reboard another tender. Since we weren’t in any hurry to get ashore, this didn’t bother us at all, but we were glad we didn’t have a private shore excursion arranged that had a hard meeting time ashore. They didn’t call for open tendering until about 12:30.
We headed down to the tender platform around 2:50 and caught a tender in about 5 minutes. We were ashore by 3:10.
My alternate plan was to visit the National Museum, but forgot to check that the museum closed at 2PM on Saturdays. Oh Well.
Grand Cayman Walkabout
We ended up walking up and down the main street, stopping in a few of the many gift shops before we ended up at a restaurant called Rackams Waterfront Bar and Grill. We ordered some Pork Sliders and Conch Fritters, along with a beer and an iced tea. The food was pretty good, service was fine, but its not a place I would particularly seek out.
Conch Fritters
There were several other ships visiting today and on the way back we walked past the other tender landing areas. The security guards for each beckoned us to board their tender, until we queried “Amsterdam?” and then they waved us off.
The last tender was 5:30 and we were at the tender pier around 5:10. We only waited a few minutes for a tender to arrive and we were back on the ship in a few minutes.
SailAway
The SailAway was held in the Crows Nest – and while we normally attend the SailAways, the ones in the Crows Nest don’t have the same vibe as those on the open decks and we didn’t stop by.
Dinner tonight had a Caribbean Jerked Pork Chop which many folks at our table ordered and was very good.
David and Dawn Meyer
David Meyer, along with his wife Dawn, performed in the Queens Lounge this evening. He plays a Xylophone Synthesizer, which has you may suspect is a Xylophone connected to a Synthesizer which David has connected together to create some amazing sounds. His wife, Dawn, is a dancer and she danced along to his music for a couple of numbers. There was an amazing couple of songs were he played music by waving his hands thru the light of laser beams.
The show was quite entertaining, and we enjoyed it very much. We had a chance to chat with them for a few minutes afterwards and they are very nice.
Back in our cabin, we discovered another pillow gift – a Moleskine Travel Journal. (photo on the blog). The ship wisely decided to hand out these first two gifts early in the cruise so we could enjoy them on this journey.
Clocks go back an hour tonight!