Grand Cayman:

This turned out to be very disappointing, and I wished I had reserved a private excursion rather than go through Princess. There were 4 cruise ships docked in the harbor, and that meant crowds everywhere. We experienced Grand Central Station on our vacation, and that wasnt welcome. We lined up for our snorkel with the stingrays tour. The first 20 people got onto an air-conditioned van, the remaining 80 or so had to board old-fashioned school buses. Also, it was raining when we got onto the tender, and when we pulled into the parking lot for the tour, the entire place was flooded. We had to carefully step onto the pier. There were no services or bathrooms at the pier, so there was no place to change when we returned. The boat was actually a catamaran, so the ride out to the sandbar was pretty smooth. But the skies were threatening the whole time. When we got to the sandbar, there were hundreds of people already in the water, surrounded by many boats in a circle. It was crowded, and not too many stingrays came into our area. Yes, I did get to feed one, (we each were told to take one, and only one piece of squid) and did line up to hold the stingray, but the experience was underwhelming. Maybe I imagined a more intimate experience. But there were easily close to 1,000 people, congregated in a relatively small area.

We returned to the private companys dock, in our wet bathing suits, and boarded the school buses again, to the main terminal. We decided to stay in town, rather than tender back and forth again. I was starving, and we found a Daily Grind coffee shop for a latte and piece of cake. Then we walked around, crowded among some 12,000 tourists, quite turned off by Grand Cayman. Back to the terminal, and a welcome lunch on the Horizon Court. Cozumel: This day at shore was absolutely wonderful. I should add that I had an advantage, since I studied Spanish (I was a Spanish major and lived in Spain for a while) and I loved being able to use my Spanish, which came back quite rapidly. Read more