Florida and Grand Cayman vacation review - Part 1

I think that it's time to post a little review of all we did on vacation. I think that I'll post a follow-up comparing Cayman to St John, since it's a frequent question on travel message boards.

Days 1-5: Captiva Island, Fl. South Seas Resort. Offshore Sailing School's Learn to Sail class

The resort: We had a 3rd floor harborview room with a garden tub, balcony overlooking the harbor, two queen beds, and in-room fridge. The resort itself is actually quite large, and it took 10 minutes to get from Captiva's main road to where we were staying. The room was clean, nice view, stayed cool. There were an awful lot of kids there (understandable since we were there the weekend after the 4th of July, so probably lots of vacationing families). Not my favorite place in the world but the beaches were nice, there was an amazing variety of birdlife around the resort (lots of Ospreys, pelicans, assorted herons, ibises, etc). If we hadn't been doing the sailing class I would never have stayed there on my own. That being said, there was probably the opportunity to do some nice kayaking along the wildlife sanctuary and stuff.

The sailing class: From 8-5 for three days straight, the instructor was wonderful and patient (his name was Biete!) and I really feel like we learned a lot. The boats (Colgate 26) were purpose-perfect; lots of room in the cockpit, sheets clearly labeled, etc). It didn't give us an awful lot of time to unwind from the hard day's work, but that was the nature of the class (there was an extended course that would allow you afternoons to do the vacation thing). Would definitely take another class with the school. Learning to sail was pretty expensive, though, like all of our hobbies it seems.

Days 5-9: The Reef Resort, Grand Cayman.

This was supposed to be the relaxing part of our vacation. The Reef Resort is located on the northeast corner of Grand Cayman, easily a 50 minute drive from the airport along a very boring road. Frankly, I was unimpressed with Grand Cayman overall, but more on that later. The resort itself was pretty nice. We had a second floor Deluxe Studio which was an end unit, balcony overlooking the pool and beach. King size bed, jacuzzi tub, small fridge and microwave and toaster, and some basic kitchen supplies. The walls were paper thin such that you could hear everything in the neighboring room, and the tiled walkways meant that you could hear every sound elsewhere (like people dropping brooms or mops or whatever with a loud clatter). I didn't really like how two rooms were entered through a single door with a little entryway. (We were in room 206B, there was a room 206A, you entered both through a door marked 206 and walked through a little tiled entryway to get to your own door). That entryway just echoed all the noise from other people entering their room, which was annoying. Not a fan.

DH and I normally love being remote and secluded from the tourist meccas at our various vacation destinations, but Grand Cayman doesn't support this very well - or at least the resort made it a little challenging. There was a restaurant on site, but almost every night we were there there was some "special" resort thing going on that made eating there impossible. Monday nights the restaurant is closed, fair enough to give the staff a day off (common in Europe). Tuesday and Thursday nights are "Barefoot Man" performances, where you have the privelege of paying too much to order off an extremely limited menu and listen to this guys music (hopefully you like it, if not you're SOL!) Wednesday night they did some kind of outdoor Mexican night thing; I have to admit that was a night when we went out for dinner, so I am not sure whether you could eat a normal dinner at the restaurant or not.

None of this would have been an issue, had there been more restaurants on the East End of the island. We went out twice - driving 30+ minutes both times - to virtually the only options available to us. This was a big turn-off for us. I'll tell the little story about our last East end restaurant drive another time, but suffice it to say that there just isn't enough infrastructure on the East End to keep a tourist who wants to stay away from the madness of 7 mile beach happy for an extended period of time.

Finally, it was near impossible to identify good beaches with snorkeling on the East End as there are few to no signs indicating destinations. We had read about a couple of spots online and were able to figure out one (Queen's Monument). Overall, it just felt like to much work to stay away from the crowds on Grand Cayman.

There was good snorkeling and a nice beach at The Reef Resort, but so many people who were inexperienced or poor snorkelers kicked up so much silt that it made it difficult to see as the afternoon wore on.

This post is getting too long - I'll continue it in the next post.