A three hour tour

So I've finally edited the cruise photos after putting it off for a month.



The boat was huge - about 12 stories tall and hundreds of yards long. I finally figured out where everything was on probably the second-to-last day.



Port? Starboard? Who knows.



Every day the housekeepers would make a towel animal and set it on the bed. Here we've got the elephant. My personal favorite was the monkey that hung from the ceiling.



Shelly stretches her trunk.



Welcome to Jamaica...or not.

The Port Authority closed down the port because of the wind and choppy seas. It was some real "Old Man and the Sea" type stuff. I almost got blown over taking this photo.



Since we couldn't dock, they just turned around and kept on trucking for Grand Cayman. Me and Shelly had our fill of eating and drinking, so we explored the ship and took pictures. The big red thing is the smokestack.



This is from one of the open decks.



They had portait photographers roaming around hitting people up for snapshots. This is from "Don't Dress Like a Slob Night."

The Caymans

This was our second scheduled port - Grand Cayman. We chartered a private sailboat and cruised out into the ocean for a few hours.

Photos can't do justice to the water. The color was so vivid it didn't seem real, like something out of a cartoon.



The pier was in a small harbor away from the noise and traffic of the tourist spots. Our trip started relatively early, so the only people around were us and a few lone skippers.



Tom and the rest of us hung out for a bit while our guide - a young Englishman with a colorful expression for everything - readied the boat.



We got to Stingray City after sailing for about 30 minutes. It was a calm spot where the animals congregated. Word was that fisherman used to skin and gut their fish in the area, and stingrays flourished there because of the easy eats.

As we snorkeled, the rays circled around and snapped up bits of food our guide brought to attract them. Their skin was slick, like wet moss.



After we ended our tour, the guide let out the sails turned off the motor.



The sun finally burned through the clouds as we headed back to the pier. Our guide told us about life in Grand Cayman on the way back. Here, Terry's listening to him tell us about rent prices.

And yes, they're outrageous.



We had to wait about 45 minutes for the ferry, so I made Shelly pose for a photo.



Once the pictures were taken, we had to amuse ourselves somehow. Shelly found a stick to take home as a souvenir.

Cozumel

Snuba wasn't bad. You breath through a hose that snakes back to a raft with an air tank. The fish here don't exactly reflect reality. The photographer carried around a bag of bread crumbs to lure the school into photo-ops.

Shelly had some trouble getting water out of her mask, so she doesn't look very chipper.



Grass huts everywhere.



The Five Suns - a trinket shop with some pretty decent stuff.



The tourist area was built to mimic a native village - the backdrop here is what would be the town square. Side note: our ship is in the far background. You can see it peeking out on the left.



Tom enjoys a beverage at Fat Tuesdays. And points.



Margaritas came in these big foot-long cups, with straws to match. The booze was double strong, too, so things got interesting.

X-Mas 2008

It's been a slow night at work, so I had a chance to work on some of the photos from this morning. You can click on them to download a larger version.



These first two are just snapshots - nothing fancy.





We had to hike into the wilderness for this one. It's from the field north of the house, where the grass is about waist-high.

The sun was pretty harsh so I had to use a flash to balance out the shadows. Other than that, nothing special.

I'll be posting the photos from the cruise when I get a chance. It's taken a while to get through them all.