Cruisin'... Day 4

We woke up in the morning as we got close to Grand Cayman. However, you can't pull right up, as the water is very shallow and the all the coral would get destroyed if the large ships got too close; so the ships anchor off shore, and we were 'tendered' to shore by small boats. (a boat transporting people back and forth between the ship and the shore).

After we ate breakfast, we went to our assigned Tour group meet up spot. The guy getting us organized checked us in, made sure that everyone had their Disney Magic Card, and a sticker to identify us as a group. Then we were instructd to follow the person with 'The Paddle of Power'! We happened to be on the Green Aladdin group. Bill thought it was the Sea Sick Aladdin tour!group. ;-)

We all went down to the area where you Get off the ship and onto the tender boat, and off we went to the shore. The first stop on our tour for the day was to go see a Turtle farm. On our way we passed by the Governors House. Then we drove past the Oldest House on Grand Cayman Island... it has even survived the many hurricanes that have hit the island.
Beautiful views of the Carribean Sea.
Our tour guide... he told us to remember our Bus number, and perhaps the License Plate number... so that we got back on the right bus afterward. He wanted us to also remember him, his nam was Marlon. -- Marlon Brando he laughingly told us... ;-)

This is the Breeding Pond. Sea Turtles have to be 13 years old before they are old enough to breed and be put into this pond. Once they are ready to lay their eggs, they crawl up the 'beach' leaving tracks, and they dig their holes - Nests - and afterward they crawl back down to the water.
The first pond where we were able to pick up and hold the turtles, they were about 5 months old. I was sort of surprised how big they were (albeit small compared to how big they will eventually grow up to be). Then we moved on to other tanks. There was this one that was almost white, instead of having a brown shell. Bill really wanted to be able to pick that one up! he tried and tried to reach for it, but it really stayed at the bottom of the tank, and did not come up to the top like the other turtles. He reach way down one time and actually got hold of it. He was grabbing both sides of the shell, and trying to pull it up and out of the water... It paddled and paddled and managed to pull away from him. The edge of the shell actually sliced his finger a little bit... Bill was somewhat surprised how VERY STRONG it was! Something else about the Turtles, was that when you held them, if you faced them toward the water, they would see it and want to get back into it! They would freak out and start flapping their flippers!!! We were told that if you stroked under it's neck, it would help them calm down... Well, what do you know?!? it worked! Bill was really good at it.
As we came around the back side of the breeding pond/sand pit area, we saw some lizzards. One was climbing down into the hole/empty nest of a turtle (after the staff had cleared teh eggs out to take tehm to incubators). Then after holding some more Turtles, I tuned around and saw a big long lizzard on the wall. It was cool looking, so I moved in as close as I could manage to get without scaring it away... to take some pictures. Inside the museum they had some incubator's o display to show you how they put the eggs to mature and eventually hatch. I thought the emptly shells were pretty amazing as well.

We had the fullest day on Day 4, I took around 20 pic's on day 3, and over 100 on day 4, so... I think I may just have to split this post in two anyway...

Macro (monday)...

O.K. I don't really know how to do macros like some of the rest of you guys - but these are my attempts. There were beautiful flowers and things to see everywhere.

I was also going to try to post it as Macro Monday... but with it taking me three days to get my first post posted, that jsut didn't quite happen. So, you can all just pretend to humor me right?

And here is a little sneak peak into some of our day tour/excursions and what we saw.