Renting a Car the next 2 Days
Grand Cayman Travelog #15
GCM Airport - Thu, 18 May 2023, 11am
Here's where our trip to Grand Cayman shifts gears. The president's club portion of the trip is over today. Most attendees are heading home. A few of us are staying on, though. On our own dimes. Because that means no more pre-organized trips like swimming with stingrays and the bat cave with an underground lake we enjoyed the past few days, we're shifting gears back to our norm of self-guided touring. We've rented a car.
We piled on a 10am shuttle bus to the airport with several of my colleagues. They were all carrying full luggage. Hawk and I had one small bag between us. (I was carrying my computer in case something went wrong with the rental arrangement that required replanning.)
The shuttle driver kindly offered to take us to the rental car offices after dropping everyone else at the airport. He warned that it was far away and hard to walk to from the airport. It was... across the street. And not some monster, 10-lane street with speeding cars and trucks but a little two-lane. With a crosswalk. I guess Grand Cayman gets a lot of tourists who are happy to traipse around expansive resorts but throw a fit if asked to walk one block.
I mentioned above having brought my computer in case I needed to replan if something went wrong. Well, something did go wrong. The rental agency's computers were down. The one person working there was able to find my reservation on a printed list, though i took her four attempts flipping through the sheaf of papers. My reservation was the second one listed, on the first page. 🙄 But I guess she appreciated my patience, and/or my decision to buy all the optional insurance, because she upgraded me at least 2 car classes. We've got a Kia Cadenza for the next few days. It's a full-size car and it's way bigger than we need.
One weird thing I've noticed right away about this car is that the driver's seat is on the left, like a car sold in America- or Canada, Germany, France, et. al. But driving in the Cayman Islands is done on the left side of the road- like in the U.K. It's nice that sitting in this car is familiar; I won't have the problem of opening the wrong door to enter! But that doesn't help with driving, as I'm sitting on the opposite side of my vehicle from most other drivers on the road.
GCM Airport - Thu, 18 May 2023, 11am
Here's where our trip to Grand Cayman shifts gears. The president's club portion of the trip is over today. Most attendees are heading home. A few of us are staying on, though. On our own dimes. Because that means no more pre-organized trips like swimming with stingrays and the bat cave with an underground lake we enjoyed the past few days, we're shifting gears back to our norm of self-guided touring. We've rented a car.
We piled on a 10am shuttle bus to the airport with several of my colleagues. They were all carrying full luggage. Hawk and I had one small bag between us. (I was carrying my computer in case something went wrong with the rental arrangement that required replanning.)
The shuttle driver kindly offered to take us to the rental car offices after dropping everyone else at the airport. He warned that it was far away and hard to walk to from the airport. It was... across the street. And not some monster, 10-lane street with speeding cars and trucks but a little two-lane. With a crosswalk. I guess Grand Cayman gets a lot of tourists who are happy to traipse around expansive resorts but throw a fit if asked to walk one block.
I mentioned above having brought my computer in case I needed to replan if something went wrong. Well, something did go wrong. The rental agency's computers were down. The one person working there was able to find my reservation on a printed list, though i took her four attempts flipping through the sheaf of papers. My reservation was the second one listed, on the first page. 🙄 But I guess she appreciated my patience, and/or my decision to buy all the optional insurance, because she upgraded me at least 2 car classes. We've got a Kia Cadenza for the next few days. It's a full-size car and it's way bigger than we need.
One weird thing I've noticed right away about this car is that the driver's seat is on the left, like a car sold in America- or Canada, Germany, France, et. al. But driving in the Cayman Islands is done on the left side of the road- like in the U.K. It's nice that sitting in this car is familiar; I won't have the problem of opening the wrong door to enter! But that doesn't help with driving, as I'm sitting on the opposite side of my vehicle from most other drivers on the road.