Off to the Islands

I have no idea if anyone ever reads this.   My guess is no, but I don't care.  I'm recording memories, even if it's just for the 2 of us.

In order to make our early flight this morning, we booked a hotel near the airport.  The rate included allowing us to park our car there for the week, a great deal.   We left home in the late afternoon and stopped at Bert's 50s Diner for dinner along the way. 

This morning we started with a 5AM alarm and a 6PM shuttle from the hotel to the airport.  Check-in was easy so early in the morning, as was security.   The lines were short but we did get to experience the full body scan for the first time.  Once we got close to our gate we stopped in a little bar for breakfast.  No, we just had egg sandwiches and coffee, but I did see a few guys at the bar with glasses of beer at 7AM!

For some reason the gate attendant called us to the gate to check us in a second time.  She never said why.  Other than that, the flight was on time and we got the seats with extra leg room, so life seemed good.  That is, until the family of 3 kids under 6, parents and au pare settled into to seats in front of us.  The youngest child did nothing but screech the entire flight.  If he was having fun, he screeched.  If he was unhappy, he howled. Luckily, we both had our good noise-cancelling headphones with us, so we only had to deal with the noise directly during take-off and landing.

It was a smooth flight, take-off and landing were on time, and we breezed through immigration and customs.  By noon we had our rental car too.  Problem is, we couldn't check into our room until 4pm. So we drove into Georgetown and had lunch at the Hard Rock Cafe, then took a little drive around the island to see if anything had changed in the 2 years since our last visit.

Grand Cayman is not a big island.  We did all that and still arrived at the resort by about 2:30PM.  Of course, they said come back in an hour, so we went to the bar on the dock to while away the time.

We are now settled into our condo on the ground floor of the pink building you see in this photo.  Yes, we can walk out the sliding glass doors from our living room and be on the beach.   Life is good.  
Grand Cayman seems deserted today.  The waitress at the Hard Rock told us it is off-season for cruise ships, but it seems more than that.  There are a lot of hotels on the other side of the island from where we stay, and they don't seem to have the tourists either.   This isn't very good for the local economy, but we're looking forward to a very peaceful week.