 Up early to work on
the trip
report for me. I just love watching the sun rise out on the
verandah! Watched us sail into port, but from the starboard
side I didn't see much until we were right on top of the island!
:-) That's OK, it was still very nice. Woke up
the girls around 7am so we could get ready and get off ship
early. Grabbed a great breakfast in Topsiders. Milan was
there and took great care of us! We bought a
DCL cooler bag ($10) and asked the room steward for ice.  Threw in
some ice, soda and water , grabbed our beach gear and headed to deck 1,
forward to disembark. You need everyone's room key card (KTTK
Card) and adults need photo ID to get back onboard. We
walked down to the water taxi, paid $5 per adult for an all day pass
(they gave us wristbands to wear) and were soon on our way. There
are beach areas to the right and left of the water taxi dock. We
headed to the left as you face the island, and walked all the way down
to a larger pink hotel with red umbrella's out front. We found it
far enough away from the pier to be both quiet and fairly empty.
I guess that Summer brings many LESS cruise ships to these islands
since so many cruise ships head to Alaska this time of year.  So
we were the only ship in port. This works to your advantage while
shopping as well. The shop owners are more willing to deal when
they only have a cruise ship a couple times a week instead of several
ships a day!
We
were approached quite a bit by the locals for everything from Taxis,
tours, hair braiding (LOTS of hair braiding!) and even clothing and
necklaces while swimming. We just politely declined what we were
not interested in, and the vendors seemed to respect that fairly
quickly!  The
beach was wonderful. We didn't want to travel
to the other side of the island and were very happy right here in
port. So happy in fact that Kristen and I got too much sun!
Ouch! (And I used 15 and reapplied!) Kristen got it worse
though... Even the girls with 30 rated SPF got a lot of color as
well. Strong sun down here! :-) We had a blast. We
had brought the foldable Swimways floats for Kristen and I and the
girls had small inflatable rings. They worked GREAT! We
just floated around all day! (thus that sunburn thing!) The
girls really enjoyed he ocean for the first time. The waves are
extremely calm here, and the turquoise water is beautiful. They
alternated between floating and playing for ages in the sand.
 They just loved all the sand toys (Thanks guys!) and had
a wonderful
time! We headed back to the ship and arrived and cleaned up JUST
after Topsiders closed at 2pm. So we grabbed some food at the
pool restaurant and it was actually very good. Chicken Strips are
great and the burgers are really good too. The kids wanted to go
to the club while we went back on shore to shop a bit.
|
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We were definitely
getting
our money's worth out of those water taxi wristbands! :-)
Kristen
'needed' a gold chain and I wanted to price digital cameras. We
found
a nice chain in short order, and moved on to the electronics.
Kristen
is intimidated by my Minolta camera, and it IS a bit bulky
sometimes.
We wanted a nice, small (pocket size) camera that she could easily
use. Found a Casio QV-R51 that she really liked that is
tiny with a
nice 2 inch screen. That screen makes it very easy to see the
pictures
to make sure they came out OK. OK - times up - back to the
ship to
get ready for dinner. 
Tonight if Tropicalifragilisticexpaladocious night!
We all have
matching Mickey tropical shirts to wear. Headed down a bit early
and
found Minnie and Pluto for a quick picture before heading in to
dinner. Tonight is Animator's Palette, but all the 'color'
is on from
the start and they play cartoons on the video screens. Maddy was
quite
taken with the cartoons, and we couldn't get her to look at us too
much! ;-) 
The waiters were in fine tropical form with
brightly
colored shirts. And after dinner they did a fun limbo that was
RIGHT
next to our table! 