Celebrations!

Happy New Year’s Eve to you all! Many of you may think this is the big holiday at the end of December. In fact, the big holiday was yesterday – my birthday!! That’s right, I am older and wiser now. Jeff took me out for a fabulous sushi dinner and the best ice cream in the world. It was a wonderful night.

My family also threw me a big birthday bash! Unfortunately I could not attend, but from what I hear, it was quite the shebang. They tried to send me pictures, but that hasn’t worked yet. Hopefully they’ll try again soon and I’ll post the pictures when I can.

I hope you all enjoy the New Year’s festivities! We will be on our beach. I’m going to do my best to stay awake until midnight!

- Lisa

Creepy Turtles

We had our second Christmas dinner (thereby making it Christmas supper) at the Cayman Islander. It’s a former resort/motel that has become semi long-term apartments for a lot of ex-pats complete with a pool, hot tub, grills, “clubhouse”, and scenic pond.
We were told that if you walk up to the pond, turtles will come expecting to be fed.
This we had to see.
We walked over and within 2 or 3 minutes no less than 17(!!!) turtles swam over to see us! Here are 9 of them.



They were coming from all the way across the pond! And the water was so green and murky there’s no way they could see us. There was some sort of turtle telepathy at work.
Very creepy.
It was even creepier when they started coming out of the water towards us, very slowly.
Almost too slowly.



Having no food we feared that they may decide to go for our toes so we turned and ran as fast as we could.

-jeff.

Oro Verde

Last monday Lisa and i got to go dive at the wreck of the Oro Verde.



Here are some pix from our dive-






While taking this picture (which took forever- these little guys are FAST- like taking pictures of gnats!),



Lisa scared the bejeezus out of me with this thing.






Ever wonder where sharks sleep?
Wherever they want, of course.
This one chose to sleep under this piece of coral.



Its a Nurse Shark, about 6 feet long. They're not exactly known as man-eaters, but i'm not sure women and children would be safe.


later
-jeff.

Santa's Day After

Merry Christmas from Conch Pointe

Lisa just woke up from her turkey nap brought on by the first Christmas dinner we attended. Just in time to go to the second where we'll be eating.
Again.
No wonder we're getting so fat.

Still, its not much like Christmas when its sunny and 82 degrees, but i think we can cope.

Merry Christmas!!

After very long days at work, dealing with far too many tourists, we decided to make Christmas Eve a quiet night at home. So we ordered some Papa John’s and made our apartment even smaller by building a fort around our mattress on the floor in front of the TV.

Just us, pizza and a chair full of presents watching A Christmas Story over and over again. (Thank you TBS!)

Tomorrow is a big day full of food and friends. The longest of whom we’ve known for 6 months. We definitely miss being with our families and old friends, but there’s always next year!

Merry Christmas to all and to all a good night!

Jeff and Lisa

PS – Try to stay warm!! hehe

Santa is on his way

It’s almost Christmas. I’m very excited. We have a chair full of presents and are torturing each other with anticipation. Really, we both know what our big presents are, so it’s all the little fun things that keep us guessing. We amuse ourselves.

We’re spending Christmas eve on our own here at the shack, and Christmas day with friends for the consumption of lots and lots of food. We have the day off and that’s the best present of all.

Here is our shack dressed up for the holidays.

That’s right. Pink Christmas lights. I love them.

:) Lisa

8 Boat Day

Somedays its alot like an actual job.



8 boats = 20,000 tourists

But not today. Today the sea was angry.




More later.
Goin' bowling!
-jeff.

Christmas Lights

It seems that since there's no sign of Christmas weather-wise, the people of the Cayman Islands try to make up for it by putting up a ridiculous amount of Christmas lights.
We've seen the lights of the shopping centers and hotels every evening on the way home from work,









but when we decided last night to drive around looking at lights on houses, we had no idea what we were in for.
Almost everyone has some lights up. Some have quite a few.





And some have gone insane.



These people were allowing the public to wander around in their front yard to admire all the work they've done. Every bush and tree was filled with lights, and if there wasn't a tree where they thought there should be one, they made one with lights.



Even that place didn't prepare us for the Creighton's house, though.



They have a huge, huge yard and apparently have access to cranes to help put lights in trees! Their whole yard has been transformed into a public Christmas park complete with picnic tables and chairs.



And they've amassed a gigantic collecting of anima-tronic vignettes that are scattered about the whole place. It's indescribable! If you think you've been somewhere like it- you haven't. Lisa says it puts the Griswold's to shame.



There may have to be another entry full of pictures of this place.
I'm sure we'll be going back.

It's on!

Candy of the Sea

To make a long story short, I’m so stuffed full of lobster right now I don’t want to move.
To make a short story longer, we finally got to go fish some lobsters out of the front yard!
You’ve probably seen enough pictures of lobsters on previous entries to know that the Caribbean Spiny Lobster doesn’t have claws with which to defend itself. Don’t make the mistake of thinking that that makes it easier though. They’re not called “spiny” for nothing. They’re covered in sharp (SHARP) spines that will lacerate you before you feel them cutting! Nonetheless we persevered through spines and jellyfish and sea urchins, and brought home a bounty of sea bugs for supper.



Lisa ended up being the master lobsterer , bringing in two of the three that we caught including this massive one here.



(Though she did leave the job of actually killing them to me.)
We cut off the tails, stuffed them with butter, and grilled them just long enough to turn ‘em white.



Then, following the advice of the Iguana (www.theiguanadiaries.com), we boiled the rest and saved all the meat for making pasta and such. If we’re going to do this often, we’re going to need a bigger pot!



I’ll see about getting one tomorrow.

-jeff.

Christmas Party

Lisa and I went to my staff Christmas party last night and had a fantastic time. It was on the third floor of a place called Breezes by the Bay, which has a balcony that overlooks the harbour.



It just so happened to be the same night as the Parade of Lights which features not one, but two fireworks displays



and a parade of boats covered in Christmas lights!



And not just lights wrapped around railings- these guys went all out!



Here’s a shot of the winner of the judging passing by the stage which had bands and choirs and such all night.



Quite the Christmas party!
Knowing that half of their staff would be in no condition to show up to work today, we all got today off.
So I went diving.
Rather than spending my time underwater swimming around looking for things, lately I’ve been staying still and watching things happen.
Today was fascinating.
I came upon an unlikely crew hanging around together.



A couple of Nassau Groupers, a Tiger Grouper, a big Bar Jack, and a huge Mutton Snapper (not pictured). I decided to stick around and see what was going on. It seemed that they were jockeying for position and paying very close attention to a hole in the coral.



After about twenty minutes they got used to me enough that they let me swim right up next to them to see what they were hunting. As it turns out they had cornered quite the formidable foe.



And he wasn’t giving up without a fight.
I ran out of time and had to get back up to the boat before anything was resolved.
Oh well.

But when I got back home I noticed that the ocean in front of our apartment is flat as a pond! I called Lisa and after she gets off work, we’re going lobstering!!!!!
We’ll let you know how that turns out.

-jeff.

Phew!!!

Sorry about the lack of entries lately. We've been getting home late alot lately due to all the boats having to go around to the south side of the island to avoid big swells coming in from the west.



The harbour's too rough today to unload any cruiseshippers so all my tours got cancelled. I was looking forward to enjoying a nice day off at home, but they're pumping our septic tank right now. Since its cooled off to lower to mid 80's lately, we've been leaving all the windows open all the time, so



I gotta get outta here!!!!

-jeff

Nor'wester cont'd

Another effect of the nor'wester.



And this after only 2 days! I'm glad we didn't get hit by a hurricane this summer.

I don't mean to cause anyone much concern, but it seems Santa's had a little accident- clotheslined himself on a powerline making some early deliveries.



He should be okay in a couple of weeks.

Later
-jeff.

Nor'wester

Ordinarily the prevailing winds here blow across the island from the east. That leaves the west side of the island almost placid- perfect for diving and glass-bottomed boat trips and such.
Whenever cold fronts move across the States though, the wind changes direction and blows in from the northwest. Maybe you’ve noticed that the blue lines representing cold fronts on weather maps quite often extend down and off the map to the south. Well, we’re at the end of the line, and something about being down here right at the end of the fronts causes a lot of wind to come blowing out of the northwest, and with it, big oceanic swells come rolling in to our usually calm west side.
That’s been the case for the past two days.

All the boats that moor on the west side all have to be moved around to the south to protect them from the waves. There are only a couple of safe places to go and there’s not much room to maneuver if you get there late.



The cruiseships won’t even anchor on the west side by the bay. If they stop its on the south side where there are no real facilities for unloading/loading passengers. All the tender vessels from the ships have to share a tiny tiny little pier with each other, as well as us and several other tour companies. To say that its absolute chaos would be an understatement. In fact, most cruiseships decide to forego stopping here at all, which is why I’ve had the past 2 days off.
Here’s our little dock on the west side where we usually take on passengers.



I took those yesterday. Today the waves are actually washing over the dock. And here’s a couple of shots of the dock in front of Lisa’s shop. (Compare them to previous pics)




But perhaps the worst thing about the waves is that its lobster season (YEA! It started Dec 1st), and though the beach right in front of our apartment is legal for catching them, the water’s been way too rough to even try.



We both have the day off tomorrow. Maybe, if it calms down, we’ll get to try to catch some.

Later
-jeff.

Christmas is coming

We went to the national Christmas festival and tree lighting ceremony tonight. I'm always amazed at how small things here are, even when they're "national". The traveling fair that came to my little hometown of Loveland, Ohio was bigger than this festival. It was very cute though. I'm a fan of anything that sells cotton candy. As you can see, I'm learning to share.

We played around with Santa and his gingerbread helper


and finally (after lots and lots of talking) they lit the tree!

We were quite surprised at their choice of colors.

When we got home I had a surprise waiting for me! Jeff hung Christmas lights in our apartment. Now our little place looks quite festive. He bought the hot pink "tropical Christmas" lights which are quite popular around here. I've been enjoying the branching out from traditional red and green that seems to be big. I'm sure we'll have lots of pictures of the island lights soon enough.

Happy December!
Lisa

Culture Shock

After arriving in the U.S., the culture shock was immediate.



But not altogether unwelcome.



Just the sheer availability of consumer goods was overwhelming. Even after just 6 months away, its seems like the entire american culture is based on just buying stuff.

Speaking of, we went to the new Bass Pro Shop while in Hampton after hearing tales of this sportsman’s paradise.



I was surprised to find that I could’ve bought everything I would need to go zebra hunting under one roof!



And I really don’t understand these things.



Just to add to the shock of it all, it even snowed a bit while we were in TN!



One thing that truly disturbed me though, was the over-abundance of American flags everywhere. Not just on flag poles and cars, but on EVERYTHING! Its really becoming kind of creepy. Being down here and seeing lots of different nationalities only clarifies the fact that its only Americans who dress themselves in clothing with their nationality emblazoned across it.
I’m all for national pride, but too much of anything is dangerous.

I’ll get off the soapbox before I mention Germany.
-jeff.

Getting There

So after a last bite to eat, where we ran into this guy,



we went to the airport and hopped on our plane- astronaut-style.



Shortly after take off we got to see our end of the island from the air!



We could see our apartment!



After crossing 150 miles of ocean, we got to see Cuba, too. I think i was much more impressed by this than Lisa was, but i mean c'mon! It's Cuba!



The rest of the trip was mind-numbingly tedious. We landed in Miami, hurried through to our plane to Dallas, RAN to our plane to Knoxville, where we met Lisa’s mom a little after 11 o’clock and went straight to her grandmother’s house to sleep, after FINALLY getting to eat again.
The next morning we were up at 5:45 (AM!) and on our way to Hampton, VA. 10 1/2 hours later, I got to see my parents for the first time in 5 1/2 months.

-jeff.

We're back!

We’ve got over 200 pictures from our vacation to sort through, so there may be several installments over the next few days.
We had a fantastic time visiting home, and are very happy to be back here so we can relax a little from our vacation.
Here’s a picture that might illustrate for you how tiny our little island is.



The arrow’s pointing at the runway, which takes up about half the distance across the island at that point! Just for reference, here’s a satellite picture I found online to show you the scale of the first picture.



The arrow shows the direction of view of the upper photo, and the runway’s highlighted in yellow.

Oh! One piece of news I’ll go ahead and share is that while we were in VA, I went to the doctor



to get checked to make sure that there were no more tumours growing in my bladder.



Ouch!!! NOT the most comfortable way to spend a vacation!
The doctor said there’s no sign of any recurrence whatsoever, so at this point, there’s no reason why we can’t keep taking cheesy pictures like this for a long, long time to come.



more to come
-jeff.