It's Better in the Bahamas

 

We woke up in the Bahamas - at MSC's private Island, Ocean Cay. Ocean Cay is a man-made island that was created in the late 1960's for the purpose of mining Aragonite sand. The island sat abandoned for many years before MSC signed a 100-year lease in 2015. After spending 5 years and 200 million dollars the island was cleaned up and transformed into a beautiful 95-acre cruise resort. The island has eight white-sandy beaches and plenty of room for 5,000 passengers to spread out and explore. 

After we finished breakfast, we packed our beach bags and made our way ashore.  Our first stop was to do some snorkeling.  We had done a little research over breakfast and it seemed that our best chance for seeing some good sea-life was to snorkel around the lighthouse.

It took a bit to get into the water as it was on the chilly side (a reminder of just how close we were to Florida still.) We snorkeled for around an hour, seeing a few fish, but it was rather disappointing.

Lunch was served at the Food Court in the middle of the island.  There were other smaller places to get food as well. The line-up at the main food court was very long and limited places to sit.  It probably took 45 minutes to get through the line. The food was what you would expect for a beach set up - BBQ foods, fruits, salads, etc,  and there was ample food to go around.

When we finally finished lunch, we decided to spend an hour just soaking up some rays one of the beaches.  It was a very relaxing afternoon.

The island is quite large but there are shuttles to take guests around to the various spots. The wait can be long as the shuttles aren't abundant.  For the most part we didn't mind walking, but when it came time to head back to the ship we were at the farthest point away, so we decided to wait until we were able to get on a shuttle.

We enjoyed our day on Ocean Cay.  The island is beautiful and there's lots to do and explore.

The following day we were in Nassau, in the Bahamas. We only had about 4 hours on shore, so we decided to walk around the shopping district.  If you've cruised in the Caribbean you'll know that most of the shopping districts consist of jewelry stores.  It was fun just to window shop and collect our free charms.  We did buy a couple of small things. 

Photo by Colin Lloyd on Unsplash

There were at least 5 other ships in port, so the port area and stores were very busy.  I don't do well with crowds, so by the time we got back on board I was ready for some quiet time.

Photo by Georgy Trofimov on Unsplash