Today was Grand Turk! This island quickly had us in love….

We were shook awake once again by the side thrusters from the ship but it was fine by us on this day, we all wanted to get up early. We all decided the night before to get off the ship by 9:30. We walked to the beach and previous research told me to keep walking farther down the beach. The locals charge for chairs/umbrellas and of course the ones closer to the ship cost more. There are some free ones when you first get off. They have the green umbrellas but are behind all the pay ones and so you don’t really get a view of the beach.

Our first chair guy said $30 for 2 chairs or $50 for a cabana tent and 4 chairs. The cabana was tempting but wanted to get further away from the ship as our only view pretty much was the ship ahead of us at that point. After a little walk we got 4 chairs for $35. A couple of chairs got taken up just with our stuff so Chris just sat down on another chair. After a while I think they lose track of what they sold so I guess Chris got squatting rights I guess on the 5th chair.

Of course after putting on sunscreen we all went into the water (we always had one person stay back with the stuff). Below are a number of awesome pictures from the beach.

I went snorkeling and saw some but not a ton. It was real easy to swim out and noted while I was out there at how I didn’t have to fight the tide to stay in one place but I notice swimming back to shore was more difficult. There is an area on the ship side of the inflatable water slide where there was some sunken steel and I saw some neat fish around there.

We ordered a bucket of beer. I was a confused vacationer as I thought I was ordering domestic beer by ordering Coors Light, nope that is not domestic in Grand Turk and actually cost more so it cost me $48 for 6 beers rather than what I thought would have been $36 for domestic. Whoops.

Carnival Breeze came in early in around noon and I thought the beach would really fill up, but it never really did. We never felt crowded, at least where we were at. Ella and I would later walk through Margaritaville…THAT was packed!

There were plenty of excursions that would just beach themselves right around where we were all at. Of course they had everyone hollering on the boats so it made it sound like fun. It was a little annoying for us beach people though to have to get out of the way at times. Wish they had another location to do that at. You can see a couple of them in the foreground of Carnival Breeze trying to come in.

A look down the beach. There is the inflatable I mentioned where I saw some neat things snorkeling.
They’re Linda and Heather….BEST FRIENDS!!! (it’s a song from a kids show)

Here is the beach down the other side. You can see it looks fuller but nothing crazy.
Look Out! Another Carnival demolition derby! A month before this, another Carnival ship lost control at a port and tore out a corner of their sister ship right around the main dining area. Thankfully it was fairly empty at the time.

Merging into one…
Happy family in an awesome location.
I actually went out snorkeling twice, the second time I came back with this shell. Didn’t keep it though.

Here is Margaritaville. I’m getting old as this was no longer is my cup of tea.
is 

Kinda cool with the ship in the background

It was about 2pm and we decided we would all go do a little shopping. We shopped for a good hour and took this picture by the Christmas tree they still had up.

By 3:30 we were heading to the ship.

A look back at the beach from the pier.

Linda and Kate shopped a bit longer, rest of us went right up and got a bite to eat on the Lido deck then took some pictures of the island from the ship.

Here is a look at the other end of the island. As you can see it is rockier and not a very good beach, but it would be quieter.



We highly encouraged the 3s to go down some of the water slides. It took some talking but they eventually went down.

We did hit Red Frog happy hour again and at one point Heather went down to start packing as tomorrow would be our last full day on the ship.

So I had my nights mixed up, tonight was actually the night just us adults ate and the waiters got up to sing and dance. They danced to “I Got a Feeling”. We also noted a few lonely couples sitting by themselves and we wondered how much fun that would be. We agreed going together was much better.

We missed the first showing of America Rocks so we tried to look at photos and listened to trivia in the lobby area. This is when it was fun to people watch. There was a older, skinny guy in a bow tie that really liked to air guitar and got into the 80s music they played. A guy in a suit who looked like he was a lawyer by day but by night liked to put his tie on his head and tear it up. Unfortunately, we couldn’t get the photos to work as the girls didn’t know about me and Chris’ photo shoot from the night before, so at this point they still didn’t know.

We made it to America Rocks fully expecting Patrick to lead most of the way but surprisingly he didn’t overpower it like the days before. Although, at one point Patrick did break into “Sweet Home Alabama” and a guy behind us simply said “Oh Gawd!” At which point us adults all busted out laughing and turned back to him in agreement.

Chris and I decided to do another photo shoot, this time with the wives present. We told the lady to put us in the most awkward position she puts other people in. Here are some photos.

Of course we couldn’t help but laugh doing this. The pictures above were the ones Heather took and that wasn’t all the poses up to this point. There were others she missed. I tried to keep it serious but people would walk by and of course stare so I couldn’t help but start laughing.

We thought we were done, then the lady came back and said, “OH! I Have another pose I want to try” So we came back to these…

The lady was an awesome sport. I believe her name was Tresha.

We went to the 11:30pm comedy. The guy was good but was really good when he interacted with people. I think he knew that too because that was most of his show was him bringing people up and having them do stuff.

Per usual, we played a few quick hands of Wizard, got our pizza and got back to the room by 1:30am. The late night buffet was the usual food from the nights before, once again, little disappointing. Surprisingly, all the girls were in bed by the time we got to the room.

Tomorrow….Day 6 – Sea Day