Grand Bahama 2011

I just got back from a fantastic holiday in the Grand Bahamas. My friend Tiff had a timeshare to use and chose Grand Bahamas for rest and relaxation. Tiff, Alison Decker, and I flew in on Saturday. Their flight got in a half hour before mine. There was only one couple in head of me at customs so it was quick. I didn’t know where I was going to stay as I didn’t really care. The customs guy was a bit upset that I did not have that information on the form. I’m not sure why that was so critical as I did have a return ticket home. What if I didn’t make any reservations in advance? Anyway, when I got through Tiff and Alison were sitting on the luggage turn style. It was nice to have them there. I got my bag and we took a taxi to our condo.

These two pictures were the view from our patio.  We would just walk out to the ocean or the pool.  It was perfect!

Evidently everyone thinks where we were staying was a place that didn’t have anything going on. I thought that’s what made it so nice. I really liked that there wasn’t anything going on. There were ten units each with two floors. We had two bedrooms and two and a half baths. We had a beautiful ocean view and a view of the pool.

Some highlights from the trip were that we hired a charter boat to take us snorkeling. We didn’t have a whole lot of sun while I was there. I was quite annoyed by that.  On Friday, when we went out on the boat we did get sun.  I am a total snorkeling snob because I have been to some of the best places in the world to snorkel.  I had lowered my expectations so that if I just saw a parrot fish I would be happy.  Luckily it was better than that.  We saw what I call the prison fish, some yellow fish, pretty luminescent blue fish and a gorgeous long trumpet fish.  Of course there were more fish, but those were my favorites on this trip.  I also saw a nurse shark which I was really happy about as I hadn’t seen one before.  It was probably 5 feet long.

I broke my camera while I was in the Bahamas. I was trying to do a self timed picture and it fell off onto the rocks. It did still take pictures, but you couldn’t tell it was still taking pictures. I will have to find out if it’s fixable.

When the sun was out, the water was just gorgeous! We did have a nice day on Saturday and Sunday—no rain, but it just wasn’t sunny.  You can see from the pictures how beautiful it was. One part about the charter boat, besides being out in thon the water and seeing the different colors, and snorkeling, our captain took us ‘trolling’.  He had us hang onto a rope and snorkel through the water while he drove the boat.  It was so much fun, I wish he could have done that while we were snorkeling with the fish.  He had gone to kind of a dead area—no fish.  Instead there were sea biscuits which are puffy with a flower design (God just amazes me!).  There were huge starfish too.  Les’s son Adam would dive down and get us dead sea biscuits and pick up the starfish for us to hold and see. That was really cool!

We found lots of cool shells on the beaches which I was surprised by.  I didn’t expect to find cool shells.  I even found small beautiful conch shells.  There were also sea fans that had been washed up that we found. Some were still purple. There were conch shells all over the beach—again a surprise. They were weathered and also very heavy so I only brought home a small one. It was just so cool to see all of these conchs.