Jamaica!!! Day 4, 2/11/15

-

Today is already Day 4! How could we already be on day 4 of our vacation! It's flying by far too quickly!!! 

It's Jamaica day....I have to say, this port was one of my biggest struggles when coming up with a plan! I've been to Jamaica a few times, the kids have never been there. I'm not a fan of Dunn's River Falls and I knew another beach day wasn't something we wanted to do. Nothing was catching my eye! But finally we decided on the Blue Hole and we booked it with Liberty Tours. 

I'm pretty sure we had breakfast in the Main Dining Room since we didn't dock until a bit later in the day, and the gangway didn't open until about 10:45 am. The Main Dining Room ended up being our favorite spot for breakfast. The combination of the buffet there, which was definitely the freshest and least crowded, as well as the made to order menu items, not to mention the service, just made this our ideal breakfast spot! Time permitting of course!

After breakfast we wandered off the ship, taking time of course for our photo ops, on the way to meet for our tour!








And then we have the pirate pictures!

This pirate guy snuck up behind Megan and boy did she scream!  It was pretty funny!  She never saw him coming!


And off we went to find our group....

 It was pretty easy to find the private tours, and we arrived and found Liberty Tours with no problem. It turned out we had another 6 people I think it was, in our group. We had to wait for a few minutes for everyone to arrive. I want to mention also that before we left for the cruise, that Ricardo, from Liberty Tours called me in the US twice to discuss our tour. First he called when I inquired about the tour to discuss what we wanted to do during the day and describe the tour and our options. Once we had settled the "plan", I received an email outlining everything. Then about 24 hours before we left for Florida, he called again just to confirm that we were still interested. We had only had to pay a small deposit prior to arrival. He asked about if we wanted to do a private tour or if we were ok with a small group. He confirmed what we wanted to do and just was very professional. I was very pleased with everything about his service!

Ok - back to the day! A nice view of the ship while we were waiting..



Our driver for the day was Rose Marie (I think???) It's been awhile now, so I may be wrong about her name, but I am almost positive that was her. She was a wonderfully friendly and knowledgeable woman who made the ride from Falmouth to the Blue Hole, which is in Ocho Rios, feel much shorter than it was. She told us about Jamaica, taught us some of the local language and just chatted with our group during the ride. 

When we arrived, to be honest, none of us really knew just what to expect! Rose Marie handed us over to our Blue Hole guides - Ricardo and Dante, again - I think! These to guys knew this river and the falls like the back of their hands! I can't believe it, but I handed Dante my camera, yes, my Nikon, and took out my water camera, and I said to him "you won't get this we will you?" and he looked at me and smiled and said "no problem man". Oh good grief! He was all of what, 16 years old? Ok.....off we went! The 10 of us, 2 of the women in the group weren't going to get wet. They just came to watch their husbands have fun. And the rest of us, well, it was yet to be seen just what we were in for! 

First we stopped at a nice overlook where we could see some of the falls...


I'm mainly including this picture so you can see behind us, on the falls, the people waiting to walk down the falls to jump off! We'd get the opportunity....if we wanted to, to do this a bit later!


From this point on, most of the pictures were taken either by one of our guides or Megan or I with the water camera....this was on our way down to the actual river bed....

Just what were we getting into?  When I was reading about the Blue Hole, I thought it would be the one big fall, some jumping off cliffs, swimming around...hmmm....this seems much more involved!  Where were we going anyway?  

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

San Pedro, hustle and bustle!

-
Image
Ambergris Caye…it’s an interesting place to be! As I mentioned in some previous posts, we chose a resort to the north of the town of San Pedro. Portofino is only accessible by water taxi and it’s about a fifteen minute boat ride to get there. But when you get into the heart of the island the pace of life picks up. It’s still a sleepy island town by all means. But there’s much more hustle and bustle! The first thing we noticed was the primary means of transportation are golf carts. There’s a few taxi vans, but most people are driving golf carts. This is certainly unique! There’s a certain charm about this for sure. Our main reasons for going into town were to get to the dive shops, but that only brought us to the docks…to eat lunch and dinner once or twice and the obligatory souvenir shopping. We didn’t get a chance to really see any of the other hotels in the area. In my obsessive research before the trip, there were quite a few that looked nice, but now that I was there I
Read more

You'd better Belize it!

-
Image
That's right - Belize.  The first question so many people would ask was, where's Belize? They hadn't even heard of the country!  This was common I found because Belize was formerly known as British Honduras and didn't change it's name until 1973.  The second question I was asked was why do you want to go to Belize?  Belize suddenly began popping up to me in my obsessive travel research about two years ago.  I had been planning our second trip to Costa Rica and kept seeing great travel information about Belize and of course I wanted to see what was the big draw!  K and I have been to Mexico several times and had been to Costa Rica once previously and since I was planning our second trip to Costa Rica I kept Belize in the back of my mind for a future trip.  I started to do some research and found Belize has the second largest barrier reef in the world!  Now that's something!  Neither K nor I dive, but we both enjoy snorkeling so right there that was a great opp
Read more

A Beautiful Morning

-
Image
Imagine opening your eyes and seeing this.... Imagine that! I woke up early one morning and pulled back the cotton curtains to see if the sun had risen up above the sea yet, and this was what greeted me. I just had to grab my camera! I went out on our porch and sat there just in awe of the beauty of the place we were. How lucky we were to be here! How lucky to experience such beauty! I snapped a picture with my cell phone to send home to the kids. I wished they were here to share this moment with me. There were so many parts of this adventure that they would love, and yet so many parts that would be enjoyed so much more in a few more years. The timing just wasn’t quite right yet. I enjoyed this amazing sunrise alone…I didn’t wake up K yet. He wouldn’t quite appreciate the beauty of it the way I did. He was sound asleep still. He’d enjoy it in a picture. For me, my day was already perfect.
Read more