Cruising. It’s either whatever you take or whatever you make. For my wife and I, it’s always a case of it being whatever we decide to make of it. Sleep in?? While at sea?? Why in the world would we do something like that??
We were at the gym at 6am for an early morning workout. Once finished, my wife and I went on with our daily routine of having breakfast before the sun came up (a sunrise over the ocean or port of entry is something that far too many cruisers take for granted). Thankfully, we were able to enjoy a beautiful sunrise over our first port of call, Grand Cayman. Once we took a couple of pictures, we went to our room in order to get ready for the day. The weather was expected to be gorgeous and we wanted to be able to take full advantage of it.
The tentative plan was to walk around and shop a bit, then walk a couple of miles to Seven Mile Beach…all the while enjoying the weather and getting exercise at the same time. Sounds like a great plan, right? Well…things didn’t quite work out that way.
Where Grand Cayman doesn’t have deep enough water to handle cruise ships close to shore, we had to wait for tenders to come out and pick passengers up and ferry them back and forth to land. Where my wife and I weren’t in any hurry, we took our time heading on down to the tender (probably arriving at about 9:15ish) and found not only was there no line-up, but we got right on and left only minutes after sitting down.
QUICK CRUISING TIP: If you’re booked on an excursion at a port where the ship has to use a tender, either through Carnival or through a private operator, you really want to try to get down early enough so that you don’t miss out on anything. Where we had nothing scheduled at this port, everything ended up timed perfectly.
It’s really amazing to see these cruise ships up close and from the outside. As we made our way around the Carnival Legend, we noticed two other ships were on either side of us…the Norwegian Sun and the Disney Magic. As the day wore on, three more cruise ships would make their way into the harbour area. It really was quite the spectacle.
One of the things I love about cruising is that most everybody on board is as friendly as you are. As such, whenever people saw us taking a picture of ourselves they would come and offer to take one for us. Because of this we ended up with some nice pics over the course of our trip that we probably wouldn’t have gotten otherwise, like this one…
As a couple of people who really don’t get the opportunity to go out and explore the world as much as we’d love to (in spite of the fact that I write a travel blog), we thought we would spend some time checking out the local wares that were located around the grounds of the port itself. We realized that we probably wouldn’t find the best deals in the world, but we just wanted to experience as much as we could.
We spent awhile walking around the shops at the port before branching off into the streets of George Town, the capital city of Grand Cayman. Honestly, I’m not sure what we were expecting to find…we just figured that with multiple cruise ships unloading thousands of passengers on a daily basis that there just HAD to be some good shopping to be found SOMEWHERE.
Well…we stumbled upon an interesting souvenir shop that not only had more photo ops available, but had one of the most unusually-named products either one of us had ever seen.
So yeah…directly above is me with Big Black Dick. It’s not a joke, it’s actually a LINE of products found in the Cayman Islands through Blackbeard’s. According to the website:
“Richard Le Noir is a local legend, better known as Big Black Dick. His name lives on today through our range of Big Black Dick rums, liqueurs, sauces, seasonings and other mouth-watering delights that are exclusive to BlackBeard’s and the Cayman Islands.”
We found some of his other products inside the souvenir shop. One, in particular, resulted in the ONLY regret I had out of the entire trip. I mean…I can’t believe I didn’t buy some of this stuff, and I kick myself to this very day for not getting it.
Oh…what is it? Well…
So yes…let’s read the slogan at the bottom of that bottle for a second. This is BIG BLACK DICK hot sauce. Just how good is it? So good, apparently, that “YOU’LL SUCK THE MEAT OFF THE BONE”.
How many times in my life will I ever again be able to have regret at NOT having some big black dick?
Of course, there were some other fun things to be found within the store…
At this point we were getting a bit restless. We knew that the beach was a $5 cab ride away, but we wanted to do more than that. We could see hoards of people getting off of the ships and jumping into cabs, and we thought that’s what we wanted to do, too.
So after looking around, we blended in with some good folks from another cruise ship and for $20 each, decided to take a tour of the island before heading back to the ship.
We’re so glad that we did…
To Travel Or Not 