Grand Cayman Day 1: Travel Day

Mike and I have been traveling together every year for a few years but this year, we decided to invite our long-time friend, Vi, along. When I asked Vi where she'd like to go to most in the world, she said....an island. So for her 60th birthday, we invited her to Grand Cayman with us for 10 days.

She came over the night before and spent the night and we all headed to the airport about 10am. Travel day is usually pretty unexciting but this particular day, there was a suspicious package found in the airport. They shut the terminal down until about 11:45am. There was a lot of waiting around and lack of information.

We barely made it through security in time for our flight so we had no chance to eat or visit the duty free shop. This turned out to not be an issue as they served us free rum punch and Cuban sandwiches on our Cayman Airways flight.

We arrived early to Grand Cayman and picked up our Suzuki Grand Vitara SUV. It was about a 30 minute drive to our villa on the East End so we stopped at Blackbeard's Liquor Store on the way. We arrived in the dark about 7:30pm and there was no electricity. I called the owner who told me that the power company had shut off the electricity even though he paid the bill. Of course, I was suspicious about this but he assured me that it would be back on ASAP.

Because it was dark and there was no power, I failed to take pictures of the villa upon arrival (and apparently the entire 10 days). It was a huge and beautiful house, right on the water. There were four stories and three of those had decks. The first floor was an open living room, dining room, and kitchen area with a half bath and balcony overlooking the ocean. The second floor had a master bedroom and bathroom as well as two extra bedrooms and a shared bathroom. Since Vi was the birthday girl, we let her have the master suite and private balcony. We took one of the extra bedrooms and used the other for luggage. On this floor, there was an iron, spiral staircase going up to one more bedroom on the fourth floor. The basement had a futon, a couple of additional beds, full bathroom, and laundry room. It opened up onto an outdoor deck so it was perfect for storing our wet dive and snorkel gear.

To pass the time until the power came on, we decided to grab some dinner just down the road at Eagle Ray's.

I had the lionfish tacos.

Mike had lobster spring rolls.

Vi had coconut shrimp.

There were pina coladas all around. After dinner, we made our way home to find....no power. Fortunately, it came on a little after 10pm. We were finally able to cool down and relax. We ended the evening with a night walk on our rocky beach and then collapsed in bed.