2010 Cruise Day 3

Edited to add pictures!

Bill really wanted a picture of me standing in front of our ship. He said he would give you all some perspective. So, here I am in front of the ship. As you can see, the ship is bigger than I am. :-)

And I took this picture leaning over the back of the ship. Don't worry, I had the camera knotted firmly around my wrist, and I managed to hang on with one hand...(obviously I did not fall overboard!)

Here is the main pool on the Lido deck:

Art gallery:

Atrium:

Grand Turk:

We spent the morning and early afternoon on Grand Turk, one of the Turks and Caicos islands. It is beautiful here. Not too hot, not too humid, perfectly sunny, gorgeous blue water. Due to the ridiculous amount of time it takes to upload pictures, I am not going to attempt it today. Bill and I will look for free wifi when we are in San Juan tomorrow. I will go back and edit all of my posts to add the pictures I wanted you to see (I tried to upload 10 yesterday, and you can see how well that turned out!).

Bill and I went on a snuba adventure this morning. There were only 4 of us in the group, and one of the other women chickened out. She missed a lot. With snuba, you are connected to an oxygen tank by a long tube. Same concept as scuba diving, but the tank isn't on your back. It is on a raft. You can go down about 15 feet with the air hose. It was totally fascinating. I stayed along the bottom the entire time. I saw coral, all sorts of fish, and I scooped up a bunch of shells for the boys (taking coral is a no-no, but any unoccupied shells are free for the taking). Bill was a bit more hesitant and struggled with the pressure and water in his mask at first. He never came down as deep as I was, but stuck near me and even managed to retrieve a few shells of his own. At the end of our dive, one of our guides (we had 2 guides for the 3 of us in the water) found a sea urchin and let us hold it. So neat! Spiky, but not painful. I could feel it wiggling.

Grand Turk has a population of about 3700. Only about 1000 of those are natives (they call them 'belongers'). The rest are Jamaicans, Haitians, and some Americans who work for the government. It is a mix of nice, new homes, and homes that were badly damaged in a category 5 hurricane in late 2008. There are a lot of dead palm trees that need to be replaced. Holland America has a resort by the dock, and it was completely re-done after the hurricane.

Bill is off at the movie theater watching a movie, and I need to go hit the elliptical. Check back tomorrow to see if I managed to post any pictures!