JONES family: Cruise Day seven: Cayman Islands!

Our last stop: Grand Cayman. I'll be honest, I was a little nervous for our excursion this day. We were scheduled to visit "Sting Ray City"...yes...swim with sting rays. Feed sting rays. Spend the whole day with those slimy animals that killed the crocodile hunter, Steve Erwin (trust me, all the girls were a little nervous about that fact). We all piled into a very large bus which took us to our little ferry boat:

Cayman is very pretty. It has lots of really nice homes everywhere and the water is gorgeous, of course. Here is Jared and Dr. Aaron gearing up for Sting Ray City:

Cayman is a big volcano with kind of a shelf all around it, where Sting Ray City is. When we got to the City, we noticed that about 200 yards away the water got VERY dark blue...our tour guide said that is "the dropoff"...it drops 900 feet! Scary...

Sting Ray City is basically a big sandbar in the middle of the ocean where hundreds of sting rays live...they see so many people every day and they are very tame and like to be fed. Here's Jared in the middle of the rays:

They are HUGE and really aren't afraid of just sloshing all over you. They expect you to feed them, so they'll smother you with their slimy body until you do. (Can you tell I didn't love it at first?) :) I eventually got used to it and started to pet them. I always squealed a little bit when I'd feel one smother my back unexpectedly though. Jared seriously loved every minute. He got some squid from our tour guides and was feeding them like crazy. I think he was the sting ray's favorite.

Our underwater camera has a picture of Jared KISSING a sting ray on the mouth. NOT KIDDING! Our tour guide said it'll give you seven years of good luck. I couldn't do it.

After Sting Ray city, our tour guides took us to a coral garden to go snorkeling. It was amazingly gorgeous!! There were sting rays swimming with us while we were snorkeling and it wasn't as scary, they were actually really beautiful underwater. There were HUGE schools of colorful fish. Magical!

When we got back on the boat this was waiting for us on our bed:

A cute little sting ray towel.

Later that day we went down to the Ivanhoe Theater to see the game "Battle of the Sexes"...

There were different challenges in this game, and Jared and I were called on stage for the physical challenge. We had no idea what we were getting into. Here is Jared stressing out a little bit with two other guys from our big group:

My friend Emily and I were together on the girl's team.

Funny story....The game show host told us what our challenge was after we volunteered. She took a little cup and placed it across the stage. She pulled out a quarter and said, "You are going to place this quarter between your bum cheeks, walk across the stage and drop it into the cup!" She then showed us how it was done...but wasn't able to drop it into the cup. (It looked hard!) Unluckily, I had worn some pretty tight jeans. Emily went first and actually made it in the cup pretty easily! Then it was my turn. The worst part was putting it "where it was supposed to go" in front of a large theater full of people, including my friends who were videotaping it. Once the quarter was in place I could only walk on my tippy toes to prevent it from falling out. RIGHT before the cup, I lost it. Sad. I gave the quarter to Jared (we all used the same quarter! sick!), who also had jeans on. He got the quarter, put it in his small bum, walked over to the cup, then started laughing. He said his bum was jiggling and he felt the quarter coming loose, so he swung is hips around quickly before he dropped it and TOTALLY MADE IT IN THE CUP! The crowd went wild. The boys won by his amazing skills. Ask him about this someday, I'm sure he'd love to tell you the story again. :)

After the game we headed to karaoke again. We loved karaoke on the ship, seriously so entertaining! There were really hilarious people, it was the best. Here's most of our group watchin':