The planning

Last year I took the kids to Florida for their spring break and Delta called me a few months before our trip and asked if we would change our flights for 30,000 miles each. Of course I changed the flights (to ones I liked better than our originals) and we banked 90,000 skymiles! I also had what I call “puke miles” from our unfortunate luck sitting in seats near or where someone puked on our Delta flights to Spain and home from San Miguel de Allende. By combining all of those points o was able to book three round trip tickets for the kids and I to Grand Cayman for their February break.

For lodging, I looked at Airbnbs. Similar to Turks and Caicos, Grand Cayman is known for being crazy expensive, and I just couldn’t afford the hotels. Plus as always I love having the space and amenities of an Airbnb. I found two that I liked and was really torn. One was right by the famous Seven Mile Beach, and had a washer and dryer, which is so helpful on a beach trip with kids. The. second was further down the island, closer to Rum Point, right on a snorkeling beach (and you know I love snorkeling) and had a pool! Which to choose?!? I decided to just book both and do three nights in the first one and three nights in the second. That way we could do the 7 mile beach attractions first and the other side of the island second. The only downside was paying the Airbnb fees twice.

Originally my husband had to work that week but in the Fall when he got his teaching schedule for the spring, he ended up only teaching one class on Mondays and Wednesdays and the rest online. I asked him if he would want to fly out and meet us on Tuesday, that way he could teach Monday and only miss one class that week. He agreed. I ended up getting him an AA basic economy flight Tuesday morning from Syracuse to Grand Cayman using Chase ultimate rewards. I was also able to get him on our same return flight home on Delta – I even got him seats next to us! I honestly can’t remember how I booked it but I think I used Delta miles and I may have transferred some from Amex membership rewards (I need to start writing some of this down!)

The Trip

The kids and I spent the weekend in NJ and then drove out to the Philadelphia airport after lunch. We were able to pop into the Centurion lounge and get another bite to eat before our flight to Atlanta. I had the kids find the gate as I am trying to teach them to read airport signs and learn how to navigate themselves. Our flight to Atlanta was uneventful and we were able to take the shuttle to the airport Hilton Garden Inn, booked with 20k Hilton Honors points. In the morning we enjoyed a free hot breakfast thanks to my Hilton Honors gold status and we took the airport shuttle back to the domestic terminal, and the international shuttle all the way to the international terminal (the ATL airport is SO HUGE!)

At Atlanta we had time to visit the Priority Pass Lounge, The Club at Atl, for some more refreshments, before we boarded our flight to Grand Cayman. Everything was on time and we landed around 2pm, went through customs, and got our rental car. We made it to our Airbnb around 3, after driving on the left, eek! It was a nice and clean two bedroom apartment in an area called West Bay, on the west end of 7 mile beach, away from all the big resorts.

We were starving so we went to a little restaurant for lunch and chatted with the Australian server for a while who gave us some local tips. I was prepared for food to be expensive like it was in Turks and Caicos. So while our lunch was delicious it ended up running us $75 US with tip!!! We had to make sure to hit up the grocery store soon.

After lunch we drove about 5 minutes to a beach called “Cemetery Beach” because it’s behind a cemetery. It wasn’t crowded at all and the kids swam while I watched the sunset. After heading back to the Airbnb to clean up I went to the grocery store for some supplies ($43 US, not too bad actually) and we had an early night. The kids liked this Airbnb because there is a big TV in their room with Netflix and YouTube on it.

The next morning my husband was to board a 6am flight in Syracuse with a connection in Charlotte to get to Grand Cayman around 12:30pm. He texted me in the morning saying he was at the airport and the flight was delayed for an equipment malfunction. He eventually took off about an hour later, but while he was en route to Charlotte I was biting nails as he only had 10 minutes to make his connection! Turned out he made it with 5 minutes to spare. The kids and I went back to cemetery beach for a little snorkeling before he arrived, and we got caught in a torrential downpour!

The sun came out, literally and figuratively, after he arrived. That afternoon we returned to the same beach and snorkeled for a few hours. Did I mention this happened to be my birthday?? That evening we fed the kids at home and hired a babysitter that our Airbnb hosts recommended. My husband and I went out to a fancy dinner at an Italian restaurant. Everything was fabulous. The food, the view of the moon over the water, the service…it was a wonderful ending to a great birthday.

On our third day after breakfast we visited the Cayman Turtle Farm, which was only about 4 minutes from our Airbnb. They are a turtle breeding farm and while they do release some of the turtles into the wild, they mainly sell the meat as it is a local specialty. In their informational video they said this keeps people from poaching turtles in the wild. They had several large tanks of turtles and some touch tanks where you can pick them up. They also have an entire other section where you can snorkel with turtles and swim on their pool which has a waterslide. That would have been an extra $100 however, so we decided to skip that part.

One helpful hint if you are in the area. A lot of the tour excursions from the cruise ship show up around 10am, when we did. If you want to avoid the crowds, go later in the afternoon after these folks have gotten back on the ship. We left after about an hour and a half and ate lunch at a nearby restaurant on the water. After that we rested and then later we headed back to the turtle farm for about a half hour since our armbands got us in all day (and it was much less crowded this time). Then we had some more beach time and dinner at home.

After dinner we headed over to an upscale shopping area (almost all of this part of Grand Cayman is upscale), called Camana Bay. It was fun to walk around and we got some delicious gelato. The kids had fun running through a fountain, and they got soaked!

The next morning after breakfast we drove to the office of the boat tour company for our trip out to Stingray City. We took a shuttle bus to the boat and they drove us out to Stingray City. This is the quintessential Cayman activity. The story is that the fishermen used to stop at this sandbar to toss their scraps, and so the stingrays started hanging out here once they realized there was food. Now hundreds, of not thousands of tourists flock here each day on tour boats, in order to kiss and hold these ultra calm sea creatures. We anchored in a circle with about 10 other boats and there were already hundreds of people in the water. That plus the choppy water that day made the experience somewhat stressful. You could stand in the water but the sea was pretty rough so you were treading water for a lot of it. The guide holds a stingray and gathers his group around so that everyone can get a turn kissing the stingray, getting a “back massage” from it, and feeding it. Although it was definitely a circus act, it was pretty cool to hold one of these guys up close. My youngest was very scared so he stayed on my back the whole time and then I went back on the boat with him while my husband and oldest son played with the stingrays for a little longer.

After about 20 minutes they gathered everyone up and then we stopped at two snorkeling stops. Unfortunately because the water was so choppy the snorkeling was tough. The guide even said he normally goes to the barrier reef but it would have been to difficult to snorkel so he picked another spot. I did manage to get some good videos, including some of more stingrays.

After our boat tour was over we went to a burger place for lunch and then we drove down to the east end of the island to our next Airbnb. This place was in a condo complex right on the beach and it had a really nice pool. The ocean view from the balcony was spectacular! The condo itself was nice too, with 2 bedrooms, 2 baths, and a fully equipped kitchen. We spent the afternoon hanging out at the pool and we ate dinner at the condo.

The next morning after breakfast we drove north to check our Starfish point. This is a little beach all the way on the northernmost tip of the island. In the crystal clear water are a bunch of starfish. Afterwards we headed almost next door to a place called, Rum Point. It was highly recommended in everything I’d read about Grand Cayman, but I was a little disappointed that this beach was pretty much a tourist trap. It’s a private beach club and so you can use their beach loungers but you can’t bring in any outside food so that you would only buy from their restaurants. I wish some of the guidebooks had mentioned that because we brought our own food!

There is a little public beach right next door so we camped out there for a bit and ate our picnic lunch. The water was very calm and shallow. There wasn’t much of a reef but a lot of sea grass. I did buy us each a mudslide from the bar as they supposedly invented them here. I have to admit they were pretty delicious.

The place itself was packed with tourists so we left after lunch and headed back to our condo to rest and swim in the pool for the afternoon. We had dinner at a little place called “the Czech inn” (run by, you guessed it, a Czech).

On our last morning we decided to go back to Rum Point to swim, since the water was too rough at the beach near our condo. We stopped at “the Blowholes,” an area of rock and coral where the water spews up like a geyser when the waves come in. We then drove all around the north end of the island and back to Rum Point. It was actually much less crowded this time which made it more enjoyable. You can sit in their beach chairs and unlike other beaches I’ve been to, they don’t make you buy a certain amount of food and beverage to use them. The coolest thing about it was we got to see two sea turtles swimming in the water near the dock!!!

After a swim we headed back to the condo for lunch, and once we ate and showered we drove over to the Pedro St. James castle, a national historic landmark. This was actually a really cool site, inexpensive, and we were the only ones there! They first show you an multi-media film about the history of this building and the Cayman Islands. It was so elaborate, we actually felt like we were on the Pirates of the Caribbean ride at Disney. They even misted you with water during a “lightning storm.” Afterwards you could tour the grounds and the Pedro St. James Castle, the oldest and largest building on the island, which has been restored to look as it had in the 18th century when it was built. The whole museum was very well done and we learned so much about the island.

Afterward we went to their bar and did a rum tasting and talked to a local to learn even more about how the island has changed since the 60s with the massive development of the last 40 years. On our way home we stopped by a great jerk stand for our only reasonably priced meal of the trip, and the kids got to have one last swim in the condo pool. The next morning we left at 5:30am to head back to the airport! Good bye Grand Cayman!

My review of our trip

I had read somewhere that Grand Cayman is kind of like South Florida, and I agree, it was definitely the most developed Caribbean island I’ve ever been to. There were lots of strip malls, high end stores, and no shortage of multi-million dollar homes. It was a little weird to be amongst all that money, but the upside was that everything being so developed made for nice roads and easy amenities. We also did meet some locals and they were very nice. The island has an interesting, insular history and lacks the problems of its neighbor Jamaica, although apparently the boom in development has led to an influx of immigrant workers which has led to some issues for the locals.

The beaches were gorgeous and there were lots of opportunities to snorkel, although the reef did not seem very healthy. We also got to interact with a lot of wildlife such as the turtles, stingrays, and starfish. The island was quiet and easy to get around. You could see most of the major sites in a few days.

I wasn’t sure whether splitting our time between the two Airbnbs was a good idea or not, but in the end I’m glad we did. It’s only about 20-30 minutes between the West End, (where our first Airbnb near Seven Mile Beach was), and our second Airbnb in Boddentown (which is kind of in the middle but closer to the east and north ends), but there is actually a fair amount of traffic on the island. Plus the driving is already stressful with driving on the left and all the traffic circles. So I liked that at our first place we were 2 minutes from Seven Mile Beach and 4 minutes from the turtle farm. We were also very close to our boat tour. For the second half of our trip, we got to see the quieter part of the island and we were closer to Starfish point, Rum point, and the blowholes. I did like that

the first place had a washer and dryer and the second place had a pool.  Also the first airbnb was cleaner with better

amenities but the second one was right on the beach with an amazing view. It was almost a toss-up but if I went back I would stay in the second one for a week. It was just so amazing to have that view every day.

What I didn’t like about the island was how expensive the food was, although we anticipated that and so we brought some dry food from home and also shopped at the grocery store there. I also did not like how crazy busy some of the sites were when the cruise ships were docked. If you are headed to GC (not on a cruise) I highly recommend you look at the cruise schedule before you do some activities such as stingray city.

Overall, it was a lovely trip and we got to cross another Caribbean island off our list. I’m not sure if we will ever be back but I would definitely recommend it as a great vacation spot for families looking to escape the winter weather for a week.