Grand Cayman - November 2012, Travel Day

[abiknox]

Travel Day – 24th November 2012

We awoke this morning in the Premier Inn Slough! We had paid £19.00 in one of their room sales and thought the 20 minute drive to Heathrow was preferable to the 1hr 40 minute drive from home at 4am!

We woke up at 6pm, packed up our last few bits, checked out of the hotel before driving to Purple Parking longstay off site car park. It was an easy journey and after checking the car in we were on a bus and on our way to Terminal 5 within 20 minutes. The whole process was really smooth and I would recommend them to anyone looking for reasonable priced parking.

Once we were in the airport we checked in with no issues and headed to Pret for a Coffee & a Juice. We spent a bit of time just browsing in the terminal; we picked up some headphones from Dixons & some Vodka & Cointreau from Duty free as they had some really good offers on.

Just before we were called to board we headed back to Pret and picked up a couple of Almond Croissants and a Falafel sandwich for the long journey ahead. The flight was with British Airways and was 13 hours including a 1 hour touchdown in Nassau.

We boarded on time after first heading to the wrong gate – Heathrow really is enormous and that was just terminal 5 that we saw!

The flight was actually really good and not worthy of the dread I felt in the run up to it. We were seated at the back of a row before the toilets so could recline strait away without annoying anyone behind us. The leg room was really good, I know It’s supposed to be the same as Virgin but it felt more spacious to me. We wasted time watching the IFE, sleeping and eating.



I watched Magic Mike, Rock of Ages, Great British Bake off and Aaron watched the Dark Knight Rises & 50/50. The food was also nicer than with Virgin and although they didn’t come round with anything in between the main meal and the afternoon tea our croissants, sandwich and copious amount of Haribo sweets kept us content!

We landed on time and were through immigration in about 15 minutes. We walked through to find out luggage waiting and made our way out of the airport towards the Thrifty car hire building next door. We were given a nice big Yaris and after signing our lives away on the paperwork we were off. It took about 15 minutes for us to find our condo and we arrived at 7pm local time. The condo was absolutely beautiful but far too big for us. It had 3 large double bedrooms and three full bathrooms!









At this point we decided we weren't hungry enough to head out for dinner so walked across to the supermarket over the road to grab some kind of snack. When we first realised we had been given this trip to Grand Cayman we were warned well in advance as to how expensive the food/drink ect was. The Cayman island dollar is at a rate of $1.25 to the £1 and then everything gets converted up again at a rate of 1.25% to the US dollar!

I had done a lot of research on restaurants that were reasonable but nothing could prepare us for the cost of basic foods in the supermarket. Here are just a few examples of pricing we saw:

Normal size bag of tortilla chips $6.50 US dollars!
Jar of Salsa $8.00 US dollars!
Jar of Quality Street $43.75 US dollars!
Standard size frozen Margarita Pizza $22.20 US dollars!

Fruit and vegetables were not affordable whatsoever, a small bag of grapes that would cost £1 here were priced at about $6!

It was genuinely cheaper to eat out. In the end, out of desperation we bought some frozen TGI Fridays BBQ wings, TGI Fridays Spinach & Artichoke dip, a bag of the afore mentioned tortillas and some fresh baguette. We also grabbed some OJ, water & cranberry juice. Total cost $38 US dollars. Eeek!

Back at the condo we cooked the dinner and polished it off quickly before heading to bed.

[Guest]

Condo looks lovely. Wow those prices! Eek!

[Scotty]

Oh my what prices, my friend used to be a dietician in Grand Cayman, she said there were terrible diet related health issues on the island. At those prices I can see why.

[tinks75]

My neice and her hubby live on Grand Cayman and toiletries etc are so expensive too. We send all their visitors over with huge amounts of deodorant and toothpaste!

[mossyflossy]

The condo looks amazing but those supermarket prices are mad! I'd be in margarita vile every day instead...we thought the seven mile beach was stunning, one of the ports of call on a cruise a few years ago...

[Glee Fan]

Eek at the supermarket prices - you can see why they have issues with getting a balanced diet if a bag of grapes costs that!

However, the condo looks amazing

[DIBBadmin]

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[orlandosgr8]

Sounds like a great start to the holiday but wow to those prices