There are no direct flights to the Caribbean from Phoenix and the connecting ones are quite painful usually. This is true for our trip to the Cayman Islands, we have to leave past midnight arriving in Chicago at 4AM (!) when everything is closed. At least the flight is uneventful and bleary-eyed we search for a place to sleep until the restaurants open as we are quite hungry. After 5AM and towards 6AM the hallways start to fill with loud people and any chance of sleeping is gone so to the nearby restaurant we go.
The restaurant is already full and we find room to sit only near the window. It is cold and a bit breezy here but the coffee is warm and the food is good so refreshed we are ready for whatever comes next.
And what comes next is a doozy. We embark the plane at the scheduled time and then the pilot announces that there is an issue with the defreezer that should be fixed immediately. The in 15 minutes again an announcement that it will be fixed immediately. In another 15 minutes however the tone of the announcement change, now it cannot be fixed and we have to change planes. We are happy that they somehow have another plane for us and after 30 minutes of moving from plane to plane and then waiting for the luggage to make the transfer we are up in the air. We are really happy that this was not another Thailand fiasco with us stuck in freezing Chicago and settle in until we finally see the Cayman Islands out the window.
We pass over the island a few times as we maneuver for landing and then we finally land, together with another five planes. Really, isn’t there a better way to do it than land multiple planes at the same time? This leads as expected to long lines at immigration where we get after a long walk to the terminal.
Immigration is quite efficient and we even surprise the customs officials as we declare a meat product, beef jerky. They let us through and we are in the modern airport searching for the car rental counters. We go in the right direction but a friendly guard directs us to the rental car counters which are relatively far away. There we wait another hour it seems for our car to come from a mystical other site and when we get it we are really over the airport zone and can’t wait to leave.
Finding the AirBnB is easy using driving direction and lots of previous research. To our surprise even though it is a self check in the owner is waiting for us and takes us on a tour of the house and features. We even have a housekeeper in an adjacent house, not what we envisioned but at least it is a separate house.
It is a three bedroom AirBnB and that is not because we wanted to spend as much as possible, in fact it was one of the cheapest where we could cancel even close to the flight and even so we barely made it. In fact the hotels here are crazy expensive and while the AirBnb can be cheaper they can have other weird restrictions on them.
The owner of the AirBnB makes us a dining recommedations and we are starved after our very early morning breakfast so on we go to the restaurant. The food is delicious and it seems quite fresh especially the fish.
The food is so good that we also get a desert, the recommended sticky toffee pudding. It is very yummy and we enjoy it slowly as we are quite full, we are not even sure if we can walk to the car at the end of our dinner.
Surprisingly the restaurant is full even though it is out of the way, so it is quite popular. When we leave we are tired and would like to go home but still have to buy some provisions as tomorrow is Sunday and all supermarkets are closed. So we get to a supermarket buy some basics for the next days and then return to the AirBnB and fall asleep almost immediately.
