I took a ton of photos under water on this vacation.  A ton.  I think if I printed all of them out the weight of the photos may equal a ton.  OK, I’m exaggerating, but there are a lot of these photos.

You go on vacation.  You do vacation things, but then you do some new things.

People always talked about going on these snorkeling trips and I thought “whatever.”  You see some fish or something and big deal.  I mean really.  What’s the big deal of sticking your head in the water to see things??  Now mind you I live next to the Charles River, which no one ever, ever, ever needs to go snorkeling in.

But then you go to this Caribbean and the water is clean and warm and they say you can see things in it.  And they aren’t lying.  The things you see in there boggle the mind.  If you drew feet on the things are about to see, I’m sure you’d have the stars of some new Hollywood blockbuster about crime solving aliens.  Or maybe not.

Anyway, let’s see ourselves some photos.  Believe me, this is but the first round of these.  These will be many, many, many more:

(Now photography wise, I never toot my own proverbial horn, but I wanted to stick a short note in here.  Yes, they do look like photos that were taken in an aquarium but I was under the water taking all of these.  And those are some strange conditions down there.  My camera was jamming all the time, the screen would black out and I couldn’t really see much of anything as I wear glasses in the above water life and my goggles were fogging up down below.)

I guess you need these things to survive in HELL:

Making your way in the world today takes everything you’ve got.  Taking a break from all your worries sure would help a lot.  Wouldn’t you like to get away?  Sometimes you want to go where everybody knows your name and they’re always glad you came.  You wanna go where people people are all the same.  You wanna go where everybody knows your name.

You want to go…  Come on a bar in Boston?  Please.

You want to go … Kentucky Fried Chicken.  Biscuits, fried chicken, things that clog your arteries.  Sign me up.

Unless you are this creature:

Ever since I was 12 years old, I have known exactly where hell was.  It was located in Valhalla, New York.  Oh please, it has been a long time, so I can name names now.  Valhalla, New York is a small town in Westchester that I’m sure has something about it that is positive.  When attending high school there at Valhalla High School, I failed to see what that positive exactly was.

So at 12, I started to refer to Valhalla as Val-hell-a and the name stuck.  One letter difference and it comes close.  I could sit here and write and write about Val-hell-a and all that it did to me, but I’m older, wiser and honestly most of my high school memories have been replaced by those people on Glee.  I’m not sure what character I’d be on that show, but their high school has become mine and my own, Valhalla High School, Valhalla, New York, has all but disappeared from my memory, except for its colorful former moniker — Val-hell-a.

Well, so I go the Cayman Islands and what do I see?:

It’s HELL!  And Hell isn’t where I thought it was supposed to be.  But this was a humorous hell.  One of the roads on the island was named “Hell Road” by someone whose last name was hell or who had a damn sharp sense of humor, for they knew future generations of wise asses like myself would visit.

More Hell?  Sure.  Have a little Hell:

Yeah, this was a humorous hell.  But one part of it really looked like hell:

Well, now we’ve been to hell.  And it isn’t where I thought it was.

Like I mentioned, the trip to the Caymans featured all kinds of wild life.  Literally.  When I say wild life I mean things that live in the wild that come near you.  Now these are things that us non-Caribbean dwellers usually see in museums or aquariums.  I fell in love with the iguanas because they were like the pigeons or Canadian geese you see here state side.  But the iguanas were at least beautiful, unlike the flying rats.

Wildlife, yes, wildlife.  Well, there were the iguanas and there were the stingrays.  Up until the sojourn to the Caymans, I thought stingrays were to be feared and certainly not touched.  After this trip, I realize that they feel like wet mushrooms when they go by you.  And they are not to be feared.

I got to meet the stingrays on a trip to a place called Stingray City.  Check it out:

Yeah, the sky scrapers are immense in that city.  Well, I guess I should do some kind of explaining about exactly where we were here.  This is amazingly in the middle of ocean.  I’m not on a boat when I was taking the photo.  I was in the water and it came up to my waist, probably if not lower.  It was a shallow area filled with white sand.

And if you stood in place long enough, this happened:

Along your legs, you would feel something akin to a slimy mushroom.  And these things were huge.  Really big.  Not big like sharks, but big enough were it could be scary, were they to get the wrong idea about you.  But hence the title of the entry.  You aren’t the world’s largest calamari, so when the sting ray realized that, and somehow they did, this happened:

Onto the next person.  The sting ray is so over you!

You have iguanas around, you need signs like this:

And for another iguana photo, we have this guilty looking fellow (or lady).  He looks guilty because he is walking away from our van.  The driver did a funny dance to make him go.  Look at him.  He’s taking his time.  Who is going to rush him??:

Well, I’m back.  The Cayman Islands have virtually no internet, so I have to wait to get back home to start posting new stuff.

What the Cayman Islands lacked in internet, it sure made up for in atmosphere, hilarity and wildlife.  I’ll get to the three words in the previous sentence in the next few days, including the wild life.  This post does deal with the wild life though.

The Cayman Islands are full of iguanas.  I have a real soft spot for those animals.  I love animals that look like evolution or God or whatever just made and later laughed about.  There is the bull terrier, the Boston terrier, the bull dog and iguana.  All really make me laugh.

I learned during the vacation that iguanas come in all shapes and sizes.  They have fat arms, skinny arms and things hanging off their necks that look like beards.  They are also pretty damn elegant.

Let’s start with the grand daddy of the iguanas, the blue iguana.  They only live in the Cayman Islands and look like this:

A noble beast, if I ever say one.  Look at the arms.  He looks like he is wearing a wet suit that is too large.  Let’s see a few more views:

These blue darlings are endangered, so they live in a park named after England’s current monarch.  And they probably get fed extensively by the park rangers.

The island also featured other kinds of iguanas.  Like this guy:

That beard or whatever it was would open and close based on how close you got to the iguana.  See:

Some of them were kind of tiny, but agile looking:

And this finally, this unusual creature:

I bet the iguana picked this spot specifically because it was so stylish.  Those iguanas. Never a dull moment.

Somehow, I got on the train in Park Street and got off in a place with palm trees.

Well, I know, tons of radio silence over here.  I’m in this mysterious place called the Cayman Islands.  Thus far, I’ve seen, well, a lot of things.  Crazy, funny, cute, you name it.  The internet kind of doesn’t exist here, but I just wanted to post a few photos to show you a few photos of this place.  When I get the chance, I’ll put more photos up.  This is it for now:

I’m Charlie: