The Van Dyken Family Blog: Our Caribbean Vacation

So this is the last time you'll have to hear me talk about our fabulous (and almost completely paid for by Ben's work) cruise... I promise! :) Our final day, and our most favorite one, was spent on the island Nassau. It was beautiful and sunny plus it was a place with some history, totally opposite of the day before, but it was also a Sunday. And being Sunday were almost everyone on the island goes to church pretty much everything was closed down for the day; very cool but a slight bummer. We started out the morning taking a boat ride through the harbor, past all the huge ocean front mansions owed by famous people like Oprah and Micheal Jordon (who happen to live right next to each other) and out into the ocean to another smaller island to go snorkeling... since Ben and I didn't do it the day before. That was a lot of fun. The water was so clear you could literally look over the side of the boat and see the bottom. At first there was not a whole lot of fish but once everyone stopped jumping off the boat it was pretty insane. We saw tons of fish and huge schools of fish went right underneath Ben and I, if you would have stuck you arm down you could have easily touch them. I even saw a stingray. We had a good hour to play around in the water and then it was back on the boat and back to the harbor. Ben was constantly getting whistled at for going out of bounds while he was out there and he was the very last one to get back on the boat too. I went back a little before him since I started to get a little sea sick. The waves were pretty rough and if you weren't paying close enough attention you would get totally smashed by a crashing one... there's truly nothing like floating in the middle of the ocean, just completely letting it have total control over you. Incredibly powerful and amazing things those oceans are.

Back on dry land Ben rented a moped (which I stupidly did not take one single picture of). It was this cute little red one that we both could ride on, so Ben drove and I held on for dear life. He almost killed twice, no seriously he did. In Nassau they drive on the other side of the road like in Europe, it was totally screwing Ben up the whole time, plus there are a million and one one-way streets everywhere. I can't tell you how many times we went around this one block over and over because Ben couldn't figure out where to go! It was a total blast having the freedom to go wherever we wanted even though it was slightly insane. We had asked the guy we rented it from where we should go or what we should see and he mapped out a few spots for us, all of the places he suggested where fantastic. So we picked up the moped drove one little block and went and had some coffee at Starbucks, yes there was a Starbucks there... needless to say Ben was more than thrilled! While we drank our coffee and enjoyed the view of the harbor we planned out how we wanted to spend our extremely limited amount of time, we had around 4 hours left before we had to be back on the cruise ship. We both really wanted to see some pirate stuff, since Nassau is considered the pirate capital of the Caribbean, so the first stop was the pirate museum, which unfortunately was closed being Sunday and all. So we continued our ride along the beach to Fort Charlotte, which was also closed, so we didn't get to go inside and see some of the interesting collections they have in there, but we did get to walk around and climb up on top of the fort. It had the most beautiful view. Then it was time for lunch. The moped guy highly recommend this little place called the Seafood Haven on Arawak Cay. It was pretty much this little whole in the wall place where we felt like the only non-local people there. I couldn't understand anything on the menu and Ben had left, for what seamed like forever, to use the restroom. We actually started to walk out of the place when we could not find something other than shrimp on the menu. As we were walking out Ben said something about wanting fish and chips and the waiter said we have fish and chips. Do you want the whole fish or just part of the fish?! Needless to say they all got a good laugh out of us that afternoon, but it was some of the best fried fish I've ever had.

After lunch we continued cruising down the coastline and eventually pulled down this little street to see if we could somehow get onto beach. We ended up right on the beach where Sandals has their private resort and walked for awhile. There where a couple of older, really cool looking mansions that lined the beach and we just sat basically in their front yard enjoy the awesome sand and view. Then sadly it was time to drive back downtown and board the ship to return to Miami and then fly back home to LA. It was a wonderful, little vacation, not to mention our very first without the girls. And it would have never happened if it were not for Aunt Heidi. Thanks again for watching the little ones! Somehow I don't think a single beach towel was enough of a payment for that whole weekend! ;)