Grand Cayman Day 6 - Beach Beach Beach

Day 6 - Beach Beach & Beach

We  have been in Grand Cayman for 6 days now and we haven't really spend much time on the beach so today our plan was all beach!  It was a sunny day unlike yesterday so it was perfect for beach! First stop the most famous of the beaches - Seven Mile Beach! We got there early before 9 am so it was still nice and quiet and we were able to set up our travel best friend - our tripod LOL! People passing by were looking at us, probably thinking we were weird but we don't mind as long as we got some great photos of us together :)

An advantage of being there early besides avoiding the crowd is the angle of the sun which gives the pretty turquoise water color and softer light to make you look great on photos. At noon, it'll be harsh light which gives very dark shadow on your face unless you have a flash. Afternoon up till 3 pm is good too and after that it's harder to get the turquoise color because of the water reflects the sun. To get the golden sunset color, be there an hour before sunset. Any time of the day, don't forget to apply sunscreen, the Caribbean sun will burn you easily!

My pretty sandals from Guess :)

We walked back to our hotel and took our car and drive to the next one....the Public Beach. There was a big parking lot at the Public Beach and a lot of vendors here from renting beach chairs to selling food. It was started to pack here!

Since a lot of beach chairs were set up here, it didn't give much space for us for photos so we headed back to our car and off to the next beach.

Art display made from wood at the Public Beach.

We arrived at Cemetery Beach, as indicated by the name...in front of the cemetery. The cemetery was very colorful filled with flowers. We passed many cemeteries on our drive to the East End yesterday and I noticed that many cemeteries were right next to the beautiful ocean.....pretty place to rest in peace :)

We parked right at the front of the cemetery as many people parked there and then there was a little pathway on the right way to enter the beach. Much more quieter over here than the Public Beach, better view as well!

I spotted a nice palm tree on the beach so that was where we set up the tripod :) I always had a picture in my mind to associate white clouds, turquoise water, white sand, and a palm tree to make it a perfect picture of paradise haha...found it!

That was the palm tree we photographed in..right in front of a waterfront mansion.....imagine living in this house, waking up everyday and see the beautiful beach so jealous!

A panorama of the Cemetery Beach, plenty of beach area!

We continued to walk up where there was less people and a nice background with houses :)

Cemetery Beach is my favorite beach!

We spent quite some time on Cemetery Beach....I really don't want to leave!!! But then I got hungry and time for lunch! I picked Heritage Kitchen based on reviews of fresh seafood at decent prices! Heritage Kitchen was tricky to find, how to find it? When you drive from Seven Mile Beach area to West Bay via West Bay Road you'll see an Esso gas station on the left and John Gray Memorial United Church on the right, turn left at the street in front of the gas station, it will have a sign that said Boggy Sand Rd. Continue to the end of the road and turn left, you'll see two blue houses, one is the Powell Museum and another "hidden" on the back is Heritage Kitchen.

The Powell Museum and craft shop:

Heritage Kitchen:

 We parked our car right on front of Heritage Kitchen and checked out the Powell Museum and its gift shop. Free admission to the museum so check it out!

My stomach was calling me so time for lunch! Their menu:

I ordered the conch soup, the fried conch fritters, Cayman style snapper for hubby and Cayman style grouper for myself, oh and a can of orange soda....total was $42 USD. Cash is accepted here but you'll get Cayman Dollars back for change, the lady did conversion back and forth :D

Cute displays and with the Trip Advisor logo.

It was across the street from the beach so pretty view for lunch.

We went to the back side and sat on the picnic table where there was shade....it was comfortable under the shade!  We waited for our food and in between there were at least 3 tour buses stopped by!!! Here came our food! The conch soup was very good, we liked the mild spicy flavor!  The fried conch fritters were okay; I am not a fritter fan.

My Cayman style group, it was pretty good.

Hubby's Cayman style snapper....fresh!

It was good value for a fresh fish lunch! After lunch, we stopped at the West Bay Beach, a lot of vendors here selling stuff too!

We made a loop around West Bay to Turtle Farm then passed by Hell and then came back down and another loop to Morgan's Harbor. There wasn't much scenic spot to stop and see on the way though......afterwards, we drove back to the hotel.

We headed back out for dinner...we had a hard time deciding where to eat and hubby missed the crab claws so we went back to Da Fish Shake!

We got the front seat facing the sea again but no luck for a beautiful sunset as the clouds were covering the horizon grrrrr! Hubby ordered the mussels, it was $14 or $16 CI very expensive and it disappointed us! It was only 8 mussels oh wow extremely expensive and it wasn't that good! Hubby was hoping for the mussels he had in Cancun :(

But the crab claws were good and he enjoyed it at least!

The view at night with the bright star...wonder what's that star?

I had the burger, it was good and the fries were very good!

Hubby ordered the fish and chips, it was okay.

I had so many fried food in Grand Cayman and they gave me a lot of pimples ahhhhh!!!!

Here came the bill.....$95 USD (tips weren't automatically added to the bill so we made it a little bit over 15% to add up to $95).  The food wasn't bad but we weren't impressed. We drove back after dinner and reviewed the photos we took today, it is always a fun activity to see the pictures we took :) Tomorrow will be our last full day in the island and to swim with the dolphin!!!

Grand Cayman Day 5 - Drive to East End

Day 5 - Drive to East End

After two days of going on tours, we gave ourselves a break...plan for the day: drive to East End area. I woke up early as usual and while hubby was still snoring, I continued to write my blog. I went to get breakfast, it was sunny but I saw a massive black cloud uh oh! After breakfast we were ready to head out and when we opened the door, it was raining out! It wasn't just passing rain but pouring rain!!!  We stepped back into our room and tried to check the weather....internet was down, double GRRRR! We waited and waited and continued to peeked out the window to check it out, the rain finally stopped in an hour - it was almost 10 am! 

Alright plan has changed, we went to Camana Bay to check out the stores, nothing we were interested in :( Oh well since we only had been here during our first night and it was dark, now I had the chance to take some photos in daylight....well not really light, the sky was still cloudy! It was quiet here in the morning probably bad weather and still early, but we saw some folks from cruise ship shopping tours.

We went up to the observation tower, the floor was wet, really wet that I was afraid that I might slip! The stairs up were quite colorful and I really enjoyed the mosaic tile wall, pretty and creative wasn't it?

We walked around the mall and saw wild chickens roaming around...well the wild chickens are all over the island haha!

The mall was decorated with Christmas decorations!

I found this waterfall wall which I like the seashells on the wall:

We spent probably half an hour in Camana Bay, while walking back to the parking lot, there was a farmer's market today!

Next stop, we drove to George Town for lunch, yes it was lunch time already and I haven't done much yet due to the rain. Driving by the gas station...oh gosh....gas is expensive at $5.68 CI per gallon! (We were glad that we rented a compact car which has very good gas mileage, we had the car for one week and only had to refuel once at $26.67 CI)

We decided to have lunch at Casanova By The Sea, the parking lot behind it was full so we had to park across the street; we were lucky to find a spot! We sat by the water and had a wonderful view of three cruise ships.

We both ordered a virgin pina colada and hubby ordered the "LINGUINI NOSTROMO" (seafood spaghetti):

The spaghetti was pretty good. I ordered the "PENNE CONTADINA" which was penne with chicken and mushroom in a cream sauce. It was creamy and good!

The bill came to be $51.61.....yep Grand Cayman is expensive!

We began our mini "road trip" to the East End of the island. We drove down the N Church St to S Church St and first stop: Smith Cove Bacadere. There was a parking lot and we walked across the street to get to Smith Cove, it was a little beach area with some rock formations, we saw a picture of the rock looked like an iguana but we couldn't get the right angle to see it probably it was higher tide. There were few people snorkeling here.

Another colorful iguana at Smith Cove:

We continued our drive and stopped at a small marina where we saw this leaning tree.....urg is it still alive?

Back on the road again, we passed by many beautiful houses in South Sound. We even found the Bodden Sisters Christmas Display house, I wondered how it looks like when the lights are turned out at night?? Next, we arrived at the famous Flip-flop Tree! If you forgot to pack your flip-flops come here and pick a pair LOL just kidding!

This was somewhere along the road....whenever we spotted a nice area, hubby tried to pull over and find a parking spot get off to take a photo.

Tips: if you want to drive a loop around East End best to turn to Frank Sound Road heading to Rum Point and then turn right to start the loop from Old Robin Road instead of starting from Seaview Road (basically going clockwise to do the loop instead of counter-clockwise). The reason is if you are starting from Seaview Road (counter-clockwise) all the points of interest are located on the right hand side and driving on the left make it inconvenient to stop. We went counter-clockwise and many times we passed the place and had to do a U-turn back to find a parking space!

We passed the blowholes and stopped at Gun Bay where there was a beach and the Cayman Castle Villa:

Cayman Castle Villa:

We drove pass Morritt's Resort and was looking for Barefoot Beach but no luck! We did however found Davinoff's Concrete Sculptures!

The giant concrete crab, silly hubby!

The big concrete blue iguana:

and an alligator: 

A small stingray on the sand:

Turtle and mermaid:

We drove as far as Old Robin Road the intersection to Rum Point and we turned back to try to find Barefoot Beach once again....failed :( We should've printed out Testudo's Snorkel Guide with us on how to reach Barefood Beach: http://caymansnorkelblog.blogspot.com/2011/01/snorkel-guide-barefoot-beach.html

On the way back we stopped at few beaches.....the beaches here were small....

We made a stop at a craft and souvenir shop right across from Tukka Restaurant:

Then we saw this giant propeller where the Wreck of the Ten Sails is located.

Another small beach:

We made it back to the hotel at around 3:30 pm so total trip was around 3 hours. We didn't find as much interesting places as we would like but it was a nice drive to see the other side of Grand Cayman. Once we were back to the hotel, hubby was busy checking out Amazon deals of the day LOL so I walked across the street to Seven Mile Beach! Turquoise water and white sand...how much I miss you two!

The Westin Hotel on the back:

I didn't spend much time since we will be back tomorrow for more photographs :) I walked back to the hotel and rest a bit before we headed out to tonight's dinner: Lobster Night at Solana at the Marriott! 

We headed out around 5:30 pm and drove to the Marriott Hotel, we parked at the hotel guest's parking lot and went in to ask where to park for dinner. The front desk person said it's okay to park at the hotel guest's parking lot.  We went in and the facility was pretty nice....more of a resort feel!

We picked a seat right in front of the beach, not on the beach but good view enough!

I checked at the restaurant's website before we headed to Grand Cayman and saw there was a dress code so hubby packed a pant and a pair of shoe but once we arrived at Grand Cayman, we felt it might be weird if he wears a long pant LOL. He ended up wearing a nice shirt, a nice short, and flip-flops (not the Old Navy flip-flops of course) and it was fine. We saw other customers wearing shorts and flip-flops as well! The waiter helped to take a photo of us :)

The restaurant was decorated with hanging lamps...it was pretty but not pretty for photos because it'll make your photos to look like orange-yellowish color!

Lobster night - you can order as many dishes as you wish for $75 CI, the whole menu is lobster dishes except for the shrimp spring rolls! 

To start, we ordered the virgin pina colada again, lobster bisque, and shrimp spring rolls. The lobster bisque was good although it wasn't the creamy kind:

Shrimp spring rolls, it was crunchy but not our favorite:

The waiter suggested to order 2 orders of the grilled lobster tail because the other main courses are small in portion, he was so right! The 2 grilled lobster tails...they were very good!!!

Hubby ordered 2....

and I ordered 2 hahaha! (See what I mean by the yellow lights completely throw the white balance off!)

The sun has set and once again I had no luck as the clouds covered the horizon!

I ordered the lobster curry, it was small portion, taste was just okay....first time trying lobster with curry!

Hubby ordered Lobster Thermidor, he wasn't a fan of lobster thermidor so he thought it was average:

Well since it was unlimited LOL..I ordered another lobster bisque and a steak...the steak was very good!

Hubby ordered another lobster bisque and another grilled lobster tail and with a steak :D

So in total we had 4 cups of lobster bisque, 2 order of the shrimp spring rolls, 3 lobster tails, 2 steaks, 1 lobster curry, and 1 Lobster Thermidor, we did pretty good right? 

By the way, don't forget the Explore Cayman book, inside there's a coupon of 20% off the entire bill at Solana! I showed the coupon to the waiter and he wasn't sure so he checked with his manager and came back told us that 20% does apply!!! The bill of the lavish dinner plus two drinks: $160 CI that's around $192 USD included tips and 20% off, we added in extra tips to make it 20% since we had good service and the coupon saved us 20%!! It was the most expensive dinner we had in Grand Cayman but probably the most memorable well worth it!

On the way exiting the hotel, I took some night shoots :)

I do like the twinkling effect on Christmas trees :D

Hubby suggested to drive to the Bodden Sisters' Christmas Light Display, yay thanks hubby you really know what I want!!

Oh wow, it was unbelievable, it was probably the best private-home Christmas light display I ever seen! Hubby pulled over at the curbside, we didn't went in since the gate was closed so I took a few snap shoots:

Very festive!!! If you happen to be in Grand Cayman in December, you need to check that out!! Driving there was very easy, past the cruise port and continue on S Church Street!

It was a relaxing day for us even though it started unpleasant with rain but we still had some fun afterwards.  Tomorrow will be beach day, pray for better weather!