Wedding:

Honeymoon

We went to the Cayman Islands for our honeymoon, primarily to SCUBA dive, but also just to enjoy some nice weather in the middle of winter, and to relax after the planning of the wedding. We booked a flight for the morning of Tuesday, December 5th, so we wouldn't be in a big hurry to get back to Ohio after the wedding and pack our bags for the trip.

We got back to Dayton on Sunday night, and basically collapsed. The wedding and associated social gatherings were very draining! On Monday, we went to Wright State's Human Resources department to put me onto Travis's insurance, so I'd be covered if anything happened on the trip. We had tried to set it up ahead of time, but they wouldn't let us do it until we had the marriage license. Oddly, when we went on December 4th, no one asked to see the license.

Tuesday, December 5th, 2000

Tuesday, we got up really early to catch our flight out of Dayton. It was absolutely frigid that morning, but we left our nice warm jackets in Travis's car at the airport shuttle parking lot, and braved the chill to get to the airport. The flight was fine, happily. We had to stop in Charleston, South Carolina, for an hour or two, but that was no big deal. We had each other, and we also had plenty of books and magazines to read. Believe it or not, we decided not to take a laptop with us, so we were traveling low-tech!

We arrived at the airport in Grand Cayman and were instantly assaulted by heat, humidity, and the sound of a reggae band playing outside the airport. It was a tiny little airport, and we had no trouble finding our bags or getting through customs. I got my first stamp in my passport, which I had gotten a few years ago, just in case I decided to go to Europe with Travis rather than spend the summer at Camp.

The weather was gray and windy and hot for the first five days. Not what we were expecting, but it made me happy because I didn't need to wear sunscreen! At least I didn't think that I had to. I did get a little burned one day, with obvious lines from my wetsuit. Unfortunately, my wetsuit legs are longer than most of my shorts, so I looked pretty silly for a day or two.

We rode an airport shuttle to our hotel, and it gave us our one motorized view of the island. Other than that, we walked everywhere, so this was our chance to see some of the inner island. It was very similar to the outskirts of resort towns in America. Not very nice, really. The hotels where we dropped people off were beautiful, of course. Huge lawns, big white pillars, tall glass windows. After visiting several hotels, we were dropped at ours, the Comfort Inn.

I've always had good experiences in Comfort Inns. They have always been clean and nice, and usually have hot tubs in the room. This one did not have hot tubs in the rooms, unfortunately, but I still expected it to be nice. I was wrong, unfortunately. Upon first glance, we were disappointed in the room. The window looked out on a wall, not the ocean as we had been led to believe. It was extremely humid in the room and it smelled a little like dead fish. We tried to move to a different room, but it would have cost extra money, and after the wedding, we didn't want to spend any more money! Our travel agent had also promised that she would tell them that it was our honeymoon, and they would put champagne in our room. They hadn't, but they did bring some after we asked for it. They didn't offer pay-per-view movies, which are one of my favorite parts of hotel rooms, usual.

Eventually, we didn't really care about the room, as we expected. The humidity and fish smell would dissipate after the air conditioner kicked on. It had a motion sensor, so it only worked when people were in the room. Energy conservation. We didn't end up watching tv, so the lack of pay-per-view didn't matter much.

The first thing we did was visit the Red Sail Sports center next door, to schedule our diving times. We had gotten a package with 3 days of diving and a night dive. We reserved all of our equipment for rental the next day, including wetsuits and BCDs. The tank and the weight belts are included with all dives, it seems, with all companies. Mike and Delia had loaned us their masks, fins, and snorkels.

We walked around for a while, to explore our surroundings. We found a SCUBA shop, and I decided that I really wanted my own wetsuit, because I've always thought they were cool, and cost only slightly more than just renting one for the week. I'm so glad that we did, because we had thought of just going without wetsuits, figuring that it would be so warm in the tropics that we wouldn't need them. We were wrong! It gets cold down there! I bought a really nice shorty wetsuit with blue accents that made me look like a superhero. We also rented all of our equipment from this place, because it was cheaper than renting it through Red Sail Sports. I think we saved about $100 by doing that, so it pays to shop around a little. It was slightly inconvenient because we had to carry the darn things around, and BCDs are not light. If we just used the ones of Red Sail Sports, then they just have them ready for you on the boat. It's a tradeoff.

For dinner, we went out to Pizza Hut the first night. Visiting Pizza Hut on the first night in a foreign place is a tradition of ours since we went to the Bahamas for Troy's wedding. The pizza was not nearly as good as we had hoped, but it was cheap and filling. We walked around for a while, exploring the nearby area, but we went to bed early because we had to be up really early for SCUBA diving the next morning.

Wednesday, December 6th, 2000

Wednesday was our first day of diving, and it hurt a bit to get up at 7:00 to be ready at 8:00. We did it, though, and even had time to take advantage of the continental breakfast in our hotel. We luged all of our stuff to the hotel next door and caught the Red Sail shuttle down to the main Red Sail Sports boat launch place. We climbed on the boat, and set off on our first SCUBA diving trip! It was cold and windy and gray that early in the morning.

Diving was amazing! We had a great time down there! The water wasn't cold when you jump in all at once, and you didn't really notice the cold until the end of the dive when it had penetrated down to your bones. Everything was so interesting and fascinating down there that we didn't really notice.

Our first dive was at the Great House Wall on the South side of the island. The first time I went down, I was really nervous that my ears would freak out like they did on the first day of our open water training dives. I went down very slowly, and didn't have any trouble at all. I loved dropping down through the water... it just felt very very cool, and it was fun to regulate my bouyancy to speed up or slow down my descent. Travis didn't have any trouble, either, so we both got to the bottom pretty quickly.

I had been afraid that we would lose each other down there, because there is no way to yell at someone. It turned out that it wasn't a problem at all because we held hands most of the time. We'd break apart to explore a particularly cool piece of coral or go under an overhang, but we never got very far apart. I was a little disappointed that it was so dark underwater. The cloudy sky was left over from a tropical storm that had also stirred up a lot of silt, so the visibility wasn't particularly good. Certainly not as magnificent as we had been told to expect.

We learned on our first dive that it is important to pay attention to where you are. When we got close to running out of time/air, we realized that we didn't know where the boat was (well, we knew it was up). We gestured at each other with confusion, and eventually decided that we had to go to the surface to figure out which direction to head. When we got up there, the boat was surprisingly far away. We started swimming toward it on the surface, but quickly discovered that the choppiness made it very difficult and we quickly got very tired. We dropped down about 10 feet to avoid the current and eventually made our way to the back of the boat. We learned our lesson, though, and never lost our bearings again.

Our second dive was on Wild Life Reef. The exciting part of this dive was that we saw a small shark. Later, I thought about all of the shark attack movies that I've seen, and wondered that I wasn't scared at all. I mean, I know that sharks don't actually randomly attack people, but you'd think the movies I'd seen would have conditioned me to feel otherwise. Everything is so peaceful down there, nothing actually seems dangerous.

After being in the water, I was pretty miserable. I had french braided my hair, but a lot of it had escaped. It was still all stringy and salty, and my skin felt dry and itchy. It took me a few days to learn how to feel good after a dive (brush hair immediately!). We caught the shuttle back to our hotel and found that after showering the salt off, we didn't really have time to eat, so we just ate some Pringles and the bagels we had stashed from the continental breakfast. We had to catch the shuttle again at 1:00, so we dragged our stuff over again and waited to go on our second dive of the day.

Our afternoon one-tank dive was at Killer Puffer on the West side of the island. We were given the option of going on a 100 foot dive. This was only our first day of diving, so we decided to stay at 40 feet. Of course, if you only go 40 feet, you can stay down twice as long, so that was an incentive, too.

We went back to our room after this dive and took a real shower, rather than just a rinse. It felt so good to get the salt off! We spent some time in the hot tub, too, because we were pretty chilled after being in the water for so long, then riding back in a windy boat with wet hair and skin.

We walked down the road and found an amazing Thai restaurant, called Thai Orchid. We both ordered dishes that were absolutely incredible. This was by far the best Thai restaurant that we'd ever been to. While we were eating, the song we danced to at our wedding (Kissed by a Rose-Seal) came on, the elevator music version! I thought that was particularly cool, but I've always liked things like that. We ended up going there three times over the week. When we find something we like, we stick with it!

Thursday, December 7th, 2000

Thursday morning, we did our first deep dive, at Trinity Cathedral Caves, again on the West side of the island. We only got to stay down for 20 minutes, and it was a guided dive, but it was totally amazing! The guide led us through caves and under amazing overhangs, and the to the wall. The wall was incredible... we were hanging there over nothing but blue, and with nothing but a blue expanse as far as I could see. I turned myself to face the nothingness, so I couldn't see the wall behind me at all, and it felt like I was floating in space. While I was hanging there, a spotted eagle ray went flying by right at eye level. It was beautiful and graceful and unbelievable. We also saw nurse sharks below us alongside the wall. I could have stayed there forever, except for the whole breathing thing. The guide let us stay there for quite a while. He led us back into the wall through more tunnels. It was so cool. The other dives were cool, but this was definitely my favorite so far. It was worth it to dive for half as long, to see such amazing things. It was also just kind of cool to know we were so deep, though we couldn't feel any difference, really. This is the dive where Travis decided to see if the underwater camera that was rated to 30 feet would survive at 100 feet. The answer is no.

We dove at Governor's Reef for our second tank morning dive, then at North Aquarium for the afternoon dive. North Aquarium was an excellent site for fish sighting. There were many many schools of fish. We also saw a small turtle, shrimp, plankton, and a skate. There were the usual angelfish, triggerfish, and sturgeons.

We thought we'd try out a tapas bar that was directly across from our hotel. It turned out that Travis got lasagna, and I got manicotti, so it wasn't really very tapas, was it? We sat outside and tried to keep a conversation going through our exhaustion. Diving really tires you out!

Friday, December 8th, 2000

It was pretty stormy when we woke up on Saturday, and when it is stormy in the Cayman's, the dive shops take the dives out to the North side where it is more sheltered. This was our first North dive, and I'm glad we got a chance to do it. The morning dive was Dream Weaver, which was an awesome deep dive, and Leslie's Curl.

It takes longer to get back after a North side dive, so we ended up just hanging out at the Hyatt beach during the decompression period (aka lunch). We ate our bagels and napped a bit. There were cool little fiddler crabs zipping around on the beach. We had the pleasure of watching some guy stomp on one, just because it was near him. Jerk. Travis headed off to try to find some snack food for us, but to no avail. He was gone for quite a while, and checked out the video that they always made of our dives. He said there was a nice shot of us holding hands and waving to the camera. We still didn't end up buying one. I regret that a bit.

Our afternoon dive was at Lonestar Ledges, on the West side. Lonestar had many overhanging ledges (thus, the name), and there were cool creatures hanging on under there to look at. Little banded coral shrimps were hidden in every crevice. It was very fun to swim upside down and not get water up your nose. It didn't really make a difference which way you were oriented, underwater, though I felt that my regulator breathed slightly differently upside down. We also checked out the little transparent blue shrimp that have gill cleaning stations. Groupers stop on the sandy bottom, and a crew of little shrimp swarm over them and clean their gills. The guide claimed that they would give us a manicure, but after the fiasco of my wedding manicure, I wasn't willing to risk it!

We went to a chinese restaurant across the street that night. The food was unremarkable, but the woman that owned the place came and talked to us for a while about what it was like to live there, and how she had come here to avoid Jamaica (I think). She had horrible stories to tell about living there.

Saturday, December 9th, 2000

This was our last and most memorable dive day, I think. We got to sleep in a little, which we really needed, then went to Stingray City in the afternoon and a night dive that evening.

Stingray City is the world's most well known and popular dive site. It was pretty amazing, I must admit. They took us out to the North of the island to a location where fishermen used to clean their catch, then dump all of the heads and entrails into the water. It is a protected area, so the waves never got too viscious, so it was a good place for them to stop. Well, the stingrays caught on to this eventually, and many of them made it their home. The fishermen eventually stopped using this location, but then the dive shops took over the feedings. At any given time, there are several dive boats moored in this area, with divers sitting on the bottom feeding the stingrays squid.

It was really quite amazing. They set us up with extra weights so we could comfortably sit or kneel on the bottom, under about 15 feet of water. We dropped down there and formed a big circle. Immediately, the stingrays caught on that it was lunchtime, and started swimming around us, waiting for the food to appear. The guide demonstrated how to feed the stingrays, then swam around and handed us some raw squid. We hid the squid in our fists, but the stingrays could still smell it. So, they would follow your hand, following the scent. You could lead a stingray all over, if you wanted to. Travis found it entertaining to lead stingrays into my face, in fact. I fed the stingrays a few times, but I started to feel a little overwhelmed when about three of them were all rubbing against me at once, trying to get at my hand. Stingrays suck food into their mouths, they don't have any actual teeth. However, they do have raspy plates that serve the same purpose. If you don't keep your hand out flat, they can suck fingers in and cause a nasty scratch. That happened to me once, and I got a wound on my finger that scraped a big gash in my fingernail as well.

There was also a bug pufferfish named Chucky that was hanging around. The guide had warned us about him ahead of time, telling us to make sure to keep our fingers closed into fists whenever we saw him, because his jaws were made to bite through coral, so he could certainly bite through a finger. He showed up nearly right away, and he was huge! His face was probably about 6 inches square. He headed for me once, but I ignored him and he left all of my digits intact.

As cool as the stingrays were, eventually it got old, believe it or not. 45 minutes is a long time to spend just 15 feet down surrounded by an expanse of sand. There were a couple of coral outcroppings rising out of the sand, one of which was home to a green moray eel. The guide fed it and let people pet it (carefully!). Travis said that it was one of the softest things he has ever felt!

The night dive was really incredibly cool. We saw so many different creatures than before. We rented flashlights that we carried in one hand, though I think that headlamps would have worked better. It wasn't very dark when we headed out on the boat, so I was worried that it wouldn't really be a night dive, but it got plenty dark by the time we got out to the site (Paradise Reef) and into the water.

They had told us that barrier coral would phosphoress if you gave it a wave of water. We tried that, with our flashlights covered, and it was very cool. They also told us that we could feed the brain coral by enticing little bloodworms over to them with our light. That was pretty cool, because the worms pretty much exploded when the brain coral got them. I also saw a king crab, though probably not Alaskan. It was huge! It was so cool to see it in its natural element instead of on my plate that I almost decided to give up eating them. They are my favorite food, though, and I just couldn't do it. We saw a lobster, too, and several large hermit crabs.

We made our way over to the wreck of the OV. I think they mentioned what OV stands for, but I can't remember now. It was really cool to see a shipwreck in its resting place. It was covered with algae and sea urchins, and was obviously a rather nice safe place for many smaller creatures.

Overall, it was probably my favorite dive, and I'm really glad that we got a chance to do it! Afterwards, we had to get our equipment back to the shop before we could rest, and we were completely exhausted by the time we got back to the hotel. I could barely walk by this point, my foot hurt so much.

Sunday, December 10th, 2000

After all of the diving, we were both very tired, and so we left the room on this day only to get food. Ironically, this was the first sunny day of the entire week. We read and slept, with the curtains closed and just the bedside lights on. It was like a really extended night. We both needed to recover from the diving, and my bites, or whatever they were, were driving me crazy. They were so painful that I couldn't let anything touch them. Travis's ear was so swollen inside that he couldn't hear out of it, and it was his good ear, too! We were both cranky and in pain, so we just read books for hours and hours. It was nice!

Monday, December 11th, 2000

I had heard about the turtle farm, so I insisted that we go there. We caught a shuttle bus type of thing that serves as public transport on the island, and rode it for about 30 minutes to the turtle farm. It wasn't nearly as interesting as I expected, and it smelled very bad, but it was pretty cool. They had lots and lots of vats filled with cycling seawater, with tiny little turtles in them. When I say 'tiny', I mean 'about the size of an average painted turtle'. They were tiny in comparison with the year old turtles, which were about three feet long. You could pet and lift those turtles, which invariably resulted in them splashing you with nasty turtle water. The final tank on the tour was immense, and it had turtles in it that were about 12 feet long. They were the breeders, and there was a sand beach on one side so they could go lay eggs there. It was very cool to see them swimming around so gracefully, knowing that they would be lumbering around if they were on land.

We hadn't had any of our champagne yet, because we didn't think that drinking alcohol the night before we went diving was a good idea. So, tonight was our chance. We toasted our marriage and enjoyed the champagne before we walked down to Thai Orchid for our last dinner on the island. Of course, we didn't try anything different, just savored our favorite dishes. Afterward, we walked around down on the beach. We tried to sit down and have a drink in one of the oceanside bars, but they wouldn't serve us because we were barefoot. Eventually we did go put shoes on so we could sit out there and enjoy the evening. It was beautiful and cool.

Tuesday, December 12th, 2000

We weren't due to catch our shuttle until 3:00 in the afternoon, so we took this opportunity to snorkle for the first time. My feet still hurt, and Travis's ear was still swollen, so it wasn't probably as good as it could have been. It certainly wasn't as cool as the snorkling that I did in Cancun with Ken Kato, but it was still very interesting. We spent some time reading by the pool and wading in the ocean. We had a nice relaxed day and checked out just in time to catch our shuttle back to the airport.

We arrived home at about midnight that night, and were just so pleased to be back in our own apartment with our own things! We don't generally enjoy traveling very much, so our vacations always make us appreciate how much we like to be at home. Our honeymoon was excellent fun, but we were ready to be home and start our married life together!