Day 03 - 10/09/23 - George Town, Grand Cayman

With a scheduled arrival at 8am we elected to set an alarm for 7:15am.  While getting ready for the day, we suddenly heard a couple of motors get switched on.  Soon the was the sound of clunk, clunk, clunk as the anchor chain passed through the windlass on its way to the bottom of our anchorage point off George Town.  We were to be the only ship in town this day.


We ate our normal breakfast (for me it's two eggs broken and over easy, sausage, a bowl of grits with milk, and a few pieces of smoked salmon all washed down with prune juice and a hot green tea).  We gathered our things and headed to the Wajang Theater where 4-5 Star Mariners have a priority waiting area.  We made the first tender which was a shoreside tender that held 250 persons.


It was a blazing hot morning and the short tender ride whisked across the flat harbor water to the dock.  Most of the people were on HAL excursions, however since we've been here before and we have a 2:30pm last tender, we elected to find an independent tour.  For $30 per person we booked a two hour taxi tour that took us to Hell & back.  5 of us crammed into a nice air conditioned Toyota van and Pamela showed us the sights of Grand Cayman including the Governor's House, 7 mile beach, the Cayman Turtle Center, the Dolphin Center, Hell, and the Yacht Club.  Hell is an actual place with a post office and an impressive set of aggressive volcanic and coral formations.  We sent a couple of postcards home to document our presence in Hell.

Back at the port area  I helped a lady on our taxi tour get her Verizon international data & calling plan set up.  She was thrilled to say the least.  Afterwards we toured the National Museum which was interesting ($6 for seniors).  As we left the museum, the skies opened up in a tropical downpour.  Fortunately the port entrance was only a few blocks away, but we still got wet getting there.  


Once inside the port gate we enjoyed a meat patty (like an empanada and fairly spicey) and watched passengers come back to the ship before boarding the next to the last shoreside tender.    When our tender arrived back at the Zaandam, the skies really opened up and the hardest rain I have experienced in a long while deluged us.  In order to miss the bulk of the rain, everyone  carefully timed their walk on the gangway between the tender and the ship to avoid the narrow strip of cascading water off the roof of the tender.  After we boarded, 191 passengers still needed to board on the 2:30pm tender. The tender capacity was 250.


I had to change out of my wet shirt and then adjourned to the Lido aft deck under cover and ate a small ceviche salad and some chips.  I also used some of my liquid sweetener (like Crystal Light) to enhance 3 glasses of water and viewed some YouTube videos using my T-Mobile international data plan while the ship did final departure preparations.  Eventually we departed and I had a strong cell signal for almost 45 minutes.


Tonight's dinner theme honored Canada's Thanksgiving Day celebration with Turkey and the trimmings.  But I had a Cobb salad and a NY strip steak.







The evening's entertainment was a comedian, Steve Scott, who was really funny with amazing vocal sounds imitating musical instruments, elevated railway trains, and more.  Afterwards we watched a downer of a movie called "Alleluia" about the closing of a geriatric hospital.


Tonight our clocks go back another hour and tomorrow is a sea day with a lot of Panama Canal lectures and information. But I'll end today's blog with my favorite view: a wake view. A similar picture has been the wallpaper on my cell phone for at least 10 years.

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