Wednesday April 11 the Voyager laid anchor in Georgetown, Grand Cayaman – the start to my 50th birthday.

This was the only stop on the cruise where we were dealing with tenders. We were of course confused and attempted to board a tender at the front of the ship – simply because we saw others doing the same. We stood there waiting for our turn… and we just happen to meet our Cruise director. I thanked him for calling out my birthday in the morning TV show … he made a point then of escorting us to the other side of the ship and making sure we were first on the next tender.

We arrived with a bit of time to kill in the town. Neither of us were in the market for diamonds, so we browsed through some stores. My sister bought some turtles made out of shells for her coworkers. I already knew my coworkers could care less about little shell turtles so I did some people watching instead.

We finally met up with our tour group and headed out in our mini van. The guide was very informative – letting us know that everyone works in Grand Cayaman…only the elderly or disabled are given any type of help from the government. They said their nearest neighbor is Cuba and they have no quarrel with them, but as Cubans arrive by boat, they are turned away.

Up first – a visit to the Cayman Turtle Farm. Huge pools of turtles climbing all over each other to eat what appeared to be dog food. Each pool had different sized turtles… when we reached the pool where people were picking up the turtles I noticed that they were slippery little creatures. Rather than try and fail as my neighbors had, I simply requested my neighbor to let me hold the turtle they had already plucked out of the pool.

http://www.turtle.ky/turtle-album

Once we had spent a considerable amount of time looking at turtles, we finally headed across the street to Dolphin Discovery for my life long dream of swimming with dolphins. This wasn’t exactly what I thought it would be. They give you a life vest and assign you in groups of 12. Your leader takes you into a pool where you touch a manta ray – then they lead you to other side of the pool where you get to be with a specific dolphin. This is much more of a photo op than a swim with a dolphin.

1) Dolphin Kiss – You pose while the dolphin kisses you and you kiss the dolphin back
2) Hold the Ball – You hold the ball up high and the dolphin comes up and touches it
3) Dolphin Push – You swim out to the other side of the pool with a boogie board and the dolphin comes behind and pushes you back to the group by your foot
4) Dolphin Pull – You swim out to the other side of the pool and the dolphin comes, flips over on it’s back – you grab the flipper and it take a tummy ride back

http://www.dolphindiscovery.com/grand-cayman/cayman-location-overview.asp

It rained, but didn’t pour until we were standing in line for the tender to get back to ship. We were absolutely starving by this time – we had no lunch planned during our excursion.

We had our Murder Mystery Dinner that night – which was a total flop.