E² Adventures: Grand Cayman

On Thursday for our next port we went to Grand Cayman, Cayman Islands. I was way excited for this port and for a good reason. It’s beautiful! I was also excited because I got to pick the excursion for this day. I choose swimming with stingrays and a snorkel stop. We went through a local place rather than Carnival and preferred it that way. It was fun to get more history about Cayman Islands and meet more of the local people. I didn’t realize that Grand Cayman was still owned by the British. I had just assumed like Jamaica that it had gained independence but we learned a lot about the island which I thought was cool. We even got to go by and tour the governor’s house and see the hotel that all the British queens have stayed in. We then got to hear all about why its tax and duty free. I had always known that it was tax free and had heard parts of the story why, but we got the full information about the British army that crashed on the island and how the natives saved all their lives and as a reward the queen proclaimed that they would be tax free for life. How cool is that? Granted that is the short version but I loved learning all that new stuff! Once we got on our boat to go out we only had a few other people in our group, which was nice. It made it a lot more comfortable and almost a private tour. It was so amazing once we got to the sand bar. I can’t even tell you how cool it was to be standing there with 30 stingrays swimming all around you! We got to feed them and hold them and everything. It was awesome. Then after that we went a little farther out and stopped to do some snorkeling. It was so beautiful and fun! I could live in that water! After the excursion we headed back to shore and had some extra time. We grabbed some lunch and then hit up a few shops. We were so tired we didn’t really do any successful shopping haha but it was fun to just look around. After that we headed back to the ship and got ready for formal night number 2! We had our first formal night on Tuesday which um….well we forgot to get pictures of our full outfits the first night so we don't have them, but for night number 2 we went all out. People on Carnival are really casual so we kind of felt over dressed, but oh well I think we looked awesome!