Cruise Excursions: Grand Cayman

Excursion day two took us to Grand Cayman. We loved everything we saw there...except our tour guide. The first thing he told us when we got on the bus was that it was his tour, and if we were going to talk, he would be quiet and wait for us to finish. Then he very abruptly told us that it's not pronounced Cay-mun, but Cay-man. Now, I enjoy history, but that's not what we got. We, who were paying good money to visit Grand Cayman and take his tour, got chided for how Hollywood portrayed some banking scandal. Chase and I knew nothing about any movie or banking scandal, and we were already in Cayman. If we had a bad opinion of it, we probably wouldn't be there. I have no idea why this guy thought it necessary to convince us that the movie was wrong, and I felt like I was being lectured. Don't even get him started on the iguanas...

Now to the fun stuff. We boarded the bus and went straight to Hell...a limestone formation. It's pretty much a photo-op so you can say you've been to Hell.

Stop two was the Tortuga Rum Factory...which was pretty much a gift shop. Our third stop was the turtle farm, and oh my goodness who could not love these little guys?!

One of my few regrets about this trip is that we didn't buy some kind of waterproof cover for our real camera or a cheap, new waterproof camera. We, unfortunately, took a disposable camera that we never used on our honeymoon. These pics are not good, but they're our only ones of our swim with the sting rays, so please forgive the terrible quality. Just imagine that I put a really cool "disposable camera" filter on them, and then I'm an awesome hipster who uses Instagram...or something like that.

When we pulled up, this was the view. It's a good distance from the coast (20 min boat ride at least), but it's a sandbar. Big boats take loads of people and buckets of food out to feed the sting rays, so when new boats approach, the sting rays flock.

All those black blobs underwater are sting rays swimming toward our boat.

They felt so slimy/smooth on the bottom, but like sandpaper on the top. With all of the waves, it was hard to hold on to one because they just were lifted out of your arms.

Minus the photo bombers (hellooooo, Speedo guy!), these pics turned out as well as could be hoped with our terrible camera.

  
The sting rays were probably my favorite single activity. I really enjoyed their slippery sliminess, and it was amazing that they just swam all around us and didn't mind a bit that we were there.