Day 59 - February 2, 2008 - Grand Turk, Turks & Caicos

Grand Turk photos
We have a half-day of sailing to reach this small island chain of the British West Indies. We expect to be docked at Grand Turk Island of the Turks Islands at 1pm. All aboard will be 5:30pm and final sailing will be at 6pm. This is our last Sunday and our last shore stop. We planned to sleep late, but since we got an extra hour back last night, everyone onboard was up pretty early this morning anyway. Debbie got a final 2 loads of laundry in before heading to breakfast. We had our last, big, late Sunday Breakfast. Margie and Debbie had chocolate croissants and berries followed by Eggs Benedict without the caviar. Clay started with a cinnamon roll, then had 2 eggs over easy with 3 baby lamb chops, lyonnaise potatoes and whole wheat toast. We had accepted the glass of champagne when it was offered. Margie said she was not feeling well, that she was nauseous and had a headache. She felt badly all morning and could not decide if she was sick or just feeling bad because she had to pack up and leave. The seas have been fairly calm and the ship not moving around too much. There were a lot of big silver flying fish to be seen today. The water is some beautiful shades of blue here.
We arrived at Grand Turk around noon, which was an hour early. There is almost nothing on this very small island. You can see all the way across it from the ship. There is a very large cruise port/terminal area. There is a Margaritaville, beautiful beaches and a big swimming pool. It is our understanding that all of this area is free for the use of cruise ships passengers docked here. That you only have to pay for food and beverages, souvenirs, etc. as expected, but that the facilities and beaches are provided for the use of cruise ship guests. We never heard any announcement made about shore excursions or the ship being cleared. We just looked over the port side where we were docked and saw people going ashore. We were the only ship here today. Since there are only really water activities here, no one wanted to do anything. Clay and Margie went ashore and checked out the port/cruise passengers area and Debbie stayed onboard. Everything was as described immediately above, as well as the report of some quite expensive souvenir shops. Clay returned fairly quickly with a T-shirt. Margie spent a little more time sitting in a beach lounge chair in some palm tree shade before returning to the ship. We all watched the DVD Chocolat this afternoon with some popcorn and the remains of last night's cake. It can't even technically be called cake because we could find very little to even chew. It was just layers of brown sweet goo! Anyway, we still don't get Chocolat. It is a nice little movie, but none of us really love it. Sorry, not even with the aid of some awesome chocolate.
Tonight is Formal Night, the Captain's Farewell and Krew Kapers. Since we had our Farewell last night, and we have been to a few of the standard crew show/Captain's farewells we will most certainly skip it tonight. The 9:45 PGT show is a repeat so we'll skip that as well. The Compass Rose dinner menu is not to anyone's liking tonight, so we all wonder how we will make enough courses to get through our dinner at the Captain's Table tonight. This is our last Formal Dinner.
We left just about on time. It was getting dark as we backed away from Grand Turk. Here's hoping for some really smooth seas all the way since we have lots of packing to do tomorrow. About 6pm, our disembarkation packets were finally delivered. We have yellow luggage tags and are in the first group to disembark. They say they expect to begin disembarkation at 9am. It is being done a little differently than we remember at the end of the World Cruise in 2006, but hopefully all will go smoothly.
We went down for drinks in Mariner Lounge before our 7:30pm dinner at the Captain's table with him and Elsa. There were 11 people at our table. One woman we had dined with before at Franck's table. One couple was from Naples, FL and we had seen a lot of during shore excursions. Another woman from Las Vegas was on for the full Circle cruise. The last couple was from Alabama and had boarded in Buenos Aires. Dinner was enjoyable. Captain Philippe is funny and delightful. Margie was seated to his right and he told her he is 53 years old. He drives a motorcycle at home because his wife doesn't want him denting up the car! He has 3 children. He says there are no scorpions in the north of France, but that those in the south of France are small and friendly. His 3 favorite places to cruise are in order, Alaska, the Chilean fjords and the Amazon River. His least favorite is the Caribbean. Chef Mike came by to remind everyone to go to the PGT show to see his girlfriend, Heather. Some of table went, but the 3 of us did not. Tomorrow we pack, ugh!
Grand Turk photos