Just Another Day In Paradise

John and I just returned from a week-long trip to Grand Cayman, accompanied by Ethan.  Actually, the trip was Ethan's Christmas gift, so I guess it was John and I along for the ride :-)  I have hesitated posting about it, because I just can't do the trip justice with words.  It goes on my list of "Top Five Trips Taken by the Kennedy Family", and I would return and do it all again in a heartbeat.

Most vacations we take are pretty stressful.  They are crazy fun, because we always have lots on the agenda and want to make the most of every moment.  This one was the same, but minus any stress.  In fact, I can't remember the last time I felt so little stress in my life.  No worries about kid activities, no worries about our animals or property, no worries about what we are having for dinner.  It was just heaven.

For the record, the high each day was 85 degrees, with a low of 79 degrees.  We could hear rain during the night, but each day was sunny with bright blue sky.  The water temperature each day was a balmy 82 degrees.

I thought the best way to describe the whole thing was to go through a day.  Man, I wish I could live this life all the time...

8:00 a.m.  Wake up from a deep sleep.  See the Caribbean sun streaming in our hotel room.  Throw on our swimsuits and coverups and head downstairs for breakfast.

8:15 a.m.  Besides the regular breakfast food, choose from fresh cut pineapple and candy-sweet oranges.  Eat outside in the salt-water breeze.

8:30 a.m.  Grab the dive bag and drive five minutes (along the beach) to Don Foster's Dive Shop.

9:00 a.m.  Say hello to everyone in the shop.  Grab our dive gear from the shop, zip up our wetsuits, walk out to the boat slip and jump in the water.  Head out for an unaccompanied shore dive.

11:00 a.m.  Return from the dive, rinse out our gear and hang to dry.  Pull out a picnic lunch from the car (pb&j, chips, stolen oranges, and Diet Coke) and eat in the shade, on the beach.  *sigh*

11:45 a.m.  Pull out a beach chair, set it up in the shade (our pasty white skin can't take too much Caribbean sun in a day), take a nap for an hour while waiting for our 2-tank dive.

1:30 p.m.  Grab our dive gear again, hop on the boat, and head out to any one of many fantastic dive sites within minutes of the shop.

4:00 p.m.  Finish up the 2-tank dive.  Head back to the shop.  Rinse our gear, and hang it to dry.  Head back to the hotel.

4:30 p.m.  John heads out running (because, you know, SCUBA isn't enough of a work out!), Ethan and I either head to the pool, or shower and take short naps.

6:00 p.m.  We head out to dinner.  Doesn't matter where.  It could be seafood risotto at Cimboco, Hawaiian pizza at Pizza Hut, or Lion Fish ceviche at Pappa Gallo's.  It's all delicious...and exorbidantly expensive.

Cimboco--I'm not a fish lover, but their seafood risotto was to DIE for!

8:00 p.m.  Back to the hotel.  Another dip in the pool?  Or relaxing and watching a movie on the hotel TV.

10:00 p.m.  Early to bed for another good night sleep.  Get ready to do it all over again.

Yep, that's a day.  We had small variations in it all.

• One night, we actually went for a night dive.  Probably the coolest experience I've ever had diving.  We were given a small briefing about what we might see, and two "torches" (you gotta love all the Brits and Aussies that work at the shop).  We suited up and headed out to the slip just as the sun was setting.  Within minutes, we were in pitch black darkness, 40 feet underwater.  The ocean comes alive in an entirely different way at night.  Coral feeds (it looks like rock in the daytime).  Parrotfish are wrapped up in a gauzy blanket, sleeping, so we had to be careful not to wake them.  Octopi are slithering all over the ocean floor, and as our torches catch them, they change every color imaginable--purple, red, green.  We stumbled across the largest spotted lobster ever seen by our dive master--he was actually agressive.  He looked like he was from some alien movie, and John lovingly named him "Gigantor".  We almost saw hundreds of black starfish, except that everytime they felt the light, they slipped back under the coral (we saw a lot of their legs).  The large tarpon eerily hung in the water.  And the sea urchins?  Feeding and moving all over the coral.  Who knew?  Being the introverted, quiet person I am, there was nothing better than diving in the dark.  A girl, alone with her torch, in the darkness underwater.  
• The last day, we had to dive in the morning, because you need a 24-hour window before flying.  They were the most depressing dives of the week, not because of the dives themselves, but because we knew they were our last dives.  In fact, I'm surprised the dive masters didn't need to yank us out of the water at the end--we just didn't want to stop.  So, we had a whole afternoon free.  We did some shopping for the girls, and went to see "Oblivion" (a most excellent movie) in a very nice, local cinema.

One crazy story to remember (what would a Kennedy trip BE without a crazy story, or two?)  We paid our taxes just days before we left, which meant we had no cash.  Like nothing.  John said to me, "It'll be fine, Aris.  We'll just use a credit card for everything."  Yeah, I've been on those trips before when we've forgotten to bring a wad of cash, and we always need something.  So, at the last minute, I raided my cash jar and pulled out $18.00.  Good enough for tips at the airport, I thought.

Lucky us....NOT!  Our first flight from BWI to Charlotte was cancelled.  We were put on a much later flight, landing in Grand Cayman at 10 p.m. (We were originally supposed to land at 1 p.m., and dive that afternoon.  Of course, will the airlines repay us for that lost experience?  Of course not....)  John spent some of the extra time in the airport crawling underneath seats and picking up spare change (this is not a joke--it goes back to his poverty-stricken childhood).  At the end of it, he had found 75 cents :-)

Of course, I couldn't resist photographing this insanity and sending it to the kids.
If John does nothing else for the family (than totally give us the cream-of-the-crop lifestyle we enjoy),
he certainly keeps us laughing!

Proof.

By the time we showed up at the rental car company in Grand Cayman, they were closed, and every one that was open was charging us much more than our reservation.  If you know John, he wasn't about to pay extra.  So, we headed back to the taxi stand.  

One five-minute taxi ride to the hotel?  You guessed it.  $18.75.  And they didn't take credit cards :-)  Boy, John was praising my name all the way to the hotel!

So, in the morning, we didn't have money to take a taxi back to the airport, and Ethan didn't arrive until 11:30 a.m.  What would any self-respecting Kennedy member do?  That's right--put on the running shoes and RUN to the airport.  It was only four miles...along a busy highway....in the Caribbean sunshine.

You should have seen the faces on the workers behind the rental car counter when we showed up!  Phew--we were a mess!  Sweaty, and smelly....and we drank half their bottle of Culligan water :-)  And what did they say to us, in their almost unintelligible Caribbean accents, when we told them we had run there from our hotel?  "You should have caaaaaalled!  We would have picked you up!"

It's all about the story, right kids?  There was no harm done, and John and I (for the first time in a long time) had some good old fashioned time to talk!  The only thing bad that came from it was a sunburn on our faces that stuck with us the whole week (ouch!)

I kept telling Ethan that at least it was his arms (and not his chest or back) that burned while sleeping in the shade (thankfully, he was wearing a shirt).

A big shout-out to our diving "father", David Lee.  I mention him in every diving post, and his name was thrown around on a daily basis by our family on this trip.  He introduced us to diving over two years ago, and our lives haven't been the same.  He loaned us a bunch of equipment for this trip.  We wish he could have come with us, but we'll shoot for another time, another place.

Too, if you are looking for a diving outfit, Don Foster's is the best.  We've dived with them on three separate occasions now, and they are top notch.  Plus, I highly recommend staying put for a week for diving.  There's nothing like leaving your equipment over night, and not having to drag it around everywhere.  Asa, Jonnie, Rusty and Paul were the best divemasters, showing us some amazing sights underwater.

So, I took almost 400 pictures under the water.  When I came home, I trimmed the number down to 175.  We don't have a fancy camera, so our pictures aren't the best.  However, fancy camera or not, it's just impossible to really capture what happens underwater.  The ocean color is so blue, and the sea life is just beautiful.  I hope that in some future day, we'll be able to just record what we see through our eyes, because unless you go diving with us and see these things for yourself, it just doesn't translate perfectly on film.

These is a video of one of the craziest things I've seen in a while.  Ethan spotted a Hawksbill turtle in the water.  I turned on the video camera.  As I was shooting, the turtle swam underneath a diver (who had absolutely no idea there was a turtle there).

On our first day of diving, we saw FIVE turtles!

He's OBVIOUSLY happy to be diving again!

Hidden Pillars dive site--beautiful pillar coral that was over six feet tall!

Can you spot the Spotted Eel?  It was the first time we've seen one, and John found it on his own!

I love all the different colors of coral.

This is the strangest picture!  It doesn't even look like we're underwater!

I must have taken ten pictures of this Juvenile Drum Fish!  They are hard to find, and I found it on one of our shore dives (so no divemaster to find it for me!).  They are the cutest little things--they never stop flitting about.

John with his grouper friend.  Seriously, this fish was on every dive with us, and it followed John the entire time :-)  We're not sure how it knew where we would be diving each day, but as soon as John was in the water, it was right there.

John's grouper friend tends to be a photobomber too...

A cool swim-through with a cave.

Sergio Coni, one of the divemasters from the shop, built this statue and placed it in the ocean many years ago.
I think I did a pretty good job shadowing it :-)

One of our octopus friends during the day (in an old motor block, sunk on the floor)

The guys at Don Foster's were incredibly helpful.  After the first dive, Jonnie came up and told me my weight was all wrong.  He had me drop two pounds, and buoyancy will never be the same for me again.  David, you will be happy to know that our dives weren't dictated by air anymore--I came up from each dive with over 1,000 psi!  Yeah, BABY!

A lion fish (a non-native species to the Caribbean that is destroying the reef).
Ethan got his revenge by eating lion fish ceviche on our last night on the island.

Revenge...

Ethan's goal?  To see a ray this trip.  Not only did he see a ray, but we found two yellow (lemon) rays mating.

We saw two scorpion fish this trip.  We heard that accidentally stepping on one is NOT recommended!

Tarpon during the day.  They are on average about 3-4 feet long.
Imagine these things at night.   In the dark.

This is pretty much how we looked the whole trip.  In wet suits, and smiling :-)

John is the best photographic subject under the water.  He seriously never takes a bad picture!

Another new sighting for us:  a lizard fish (the stripey long fish sitting on the ocean floor)

We were always happy when we could ride on the front of the boat (yeah, yeah, I know, it's called something special--bow, or stern--but I'm not that knowledgeable)

Craziest looking fish--a HOGFISH.  He's literally white.

Bonnie's Arch--one of the best dive sites we've visited.  It's tricky to get to it, because the currents can be strong.  Lucky us, everything fell into place (about 65 feet)

The top of the arch was covered in the most vibrant coral.

And finally, another ray.  Just what Ethan ordered...