As the quarantine turns…so are the days of our lives! (To paraphrase from the old soap opera!)

On day 12, we’d sort of run out of ideas for things to do, so I pulled out the 1500 piece puzzle we have here.  I don’t know where it originally came from…but I know it was in Pentwater when we had our cottage there.  When we sold the cottage, I packed up the puzzle and quite a few books + the bookcase they were on and sent them to the island.

We’re not puzzle people -but we had time to waste and I thought… pffft 1500 pieces?  Piece of cake!  …so we opened the box.  Turns out that someone (who knows when?) had put together some of the top of the puzzle and left it more or less intact when they put it back in the box.  Excellent start for us!

After fumbling around for about 1 1/2 hours and only fitting about 4 or 5 pieces together, we looked at each other and said… “forget this!”   I took a picture of the front of the box because I was going to fake it that we’d put the puzzle together in record time…

But -alas – the picture below is as far as we’d gotten when we gave up and put it away!  **Note the similarities to the first picture I posted. **Did I mention we’re not puzzle peeps??  **Nowhere near all 1500 pieces were even out of the box yet!

On day 13, we’d officially run out of things to do to keep busy – so we reverted to Day 1… hanging out on the couch watching TV.

On Day 14, it was time to color my hair (vanity thy name is woman!).  Mike wants to make sure I give him full credit for being my colorist. 🙂  He’s a multi-talented man for sure.  In his spare time he walked up and down the stairs 62 times!!  I’m still doing 5…when I bother.  We were sort of sitting around on pins and needles waiting to hear from the government team about the details of our Covid test “tomorrow”… They didn’t contact us until very late in the day to tell us the plan for the next day.

On Day 15, we were picked up by a local cab first thing in the morning and transported quite a ways to our appointment for our second Covid test.  The location was at the South Sound Community Center.  South Sound is on the other side of Georgetown and a bit of a drive from our condo. I think everyone needing a test that day were sent to various clinics/testing sites around the island. I’m curious to know why we weren’t assigned something closer to our condo.  The taxi driver commented on that too.

We were instructed to stay inside the condo until the cab driver called to say he’d arrived at our complex.  When the cab driver called, we were ready to go and we trotted down the stairs and out the door.  (I officially consider this outing as counting for one trip up/down the stairs today for exercise.  My grand total for the day. I’m an exercise beast!)

I took this picture as we stepped out our door for the first time in 2 weeks:

We were picked up -driven about 30 minutes away, tested and brought back to the condo all in the space of about an hour!  The taxi driver took the “scenic route” and it was very nice to relax and see all the old familiar places along the way.

At the testing site I took a very quick picture because I wasn’t sure if they would allow it at all.  They had one person checking in the “patients” and two people administering the tests.  After we were checked in -we were numbers 2 and 3 in line.  It took barely 5 minutes start to finish, if that.

After we got home, we decided it was a good time to clean the condo.  We’d been pretty lax about it since we got here -so some tidying up was definitely on the “to do” list.  I have often described the point where cleaning is long overdue as … “We’ve been living like wild animals in here!” -and if the shoe fits…. (it did!)

Cleaning helped pass the time as we were really just in a holding pattern waiting to hear about our test results and find out when we’d be released. A teenage girl waiting to get asked out for a second date couldn’t have been more anxious than we were. (Since I was once a teenage girl in that exact situation, I know what I’m talking about!)

Our taxi driver had said we’d be “out” by the end of the day…but we didn’t want to get our hopes up.  The first test results (from the day of arrival) were Emailed to us later that same day, so if nothing else, I was expecting to learn the results by the end of the day.  The informational paperwork had said that it could take 24-72 hours to finalize our release from quarantine IF we had a negative test result.  The release from quarantine was supposed to be done in person by members of the quarantine team who would arrive at our door to cut the bracelets off and retrieve the tracking equipment.

Around 3:00 PM, my tracker phone rang with the news that we were officially cleared from quarantine!!  WOOHOO!  The woman on the phone said that we could cut off the bracelets ourselves and asked us to return the bracelets, phones and chargers to the government building in downtown Georgetown (the capitol of Grand Cayman) by tomorrow at the latest. I don’t know why they chose that option for us -but we weren’t about to argue with them.  It took about 3.5 seconds to find the scissors and get cutting!

The official bracelet cutting

The first thing we did with our newfound freedom was go outside and go down to the beachfront of our condo complex to remind ourselves why we were willing to do the quarantine to be here.

The second thing we did was go check out our car.  Our poor car!  It has been sitting, un-driven, for almost a year.  Our complex handyman/superman, George, has been starting it for us regularly, but even so…there are definitely some obvious issues we’ll be having to address while we’re here.  Our license plate tag expired about 10 days ago (nothing we could do about that, of course) so we’re going to need to get it inspected and licensed ASAP.

Next we went to Hell -but in the car, not a hand basket. 😉  And not because we deserved it (although not saying we don’t!) but because we were low on gas and needed air in the tires. The nearest gas station with air available is in Hell.  Then we were off to Georgetown to return the tracker bracelets, phones and the chargers.

With all that taken care of, the next thing we did will be no surprise to anyone who knows anything about our visits to Grand Cayman.  We went to my favorite, favorite, favorite place on the island….

Macabuca of course!  This is also a shore diving site -and we will be diving here very soon.  But today was about celebrating…

I liked the shark tap

We had dinner and the mandatory ice cream sandwich.  Today’s pick was Oreo.

Oreo is always available (I have been told because kids like it best). The “hope” when we go to Macabuca is that the 2nd flavor of the day is something interesting and something we want.  Sadly, today’s other flavor was Coconut Caramel.  I would have loved it if it didn’t have coconut in it.  Not a fan of coconut.  In the next 5 weeks – we’ll see what other flavors they come up for us to try out.

We usually time our visits to Macabuca to coincide with sunset -because it’s a great spot to see the sun set.  Today we were just a bit too early and not inclined to linger, so we will go there another time (or 10) for sunsets while we’re here.

After we got back to the condo, we decided to extend our celebration by going to the pool area for awhile to stretch out the novelty of being outside.  The full moon was rising and it was just so big and beautiful tonight.  As anyone who’s tried to take a picture of a HUGE moon in the sky knows – the moon in the pictures always ends up looking like “Honey I Shrunk The Kids”… but what a beautiful way to end our first few hours of being “free to move about the country.”

There are two very happy people in this condo tonight!

Categories: Cayman 2021 - Part 3, Cayman In The Time Of Covid