So day 3 of the cruise. We awoke to find ourselves docked at NAssau in the Bahamas. A quick breakfast, a disembarking, and we were off! The docks were a whirling dervish of activity as not one, not two, but three different cruise lines had ships in port! We made our way through the security checkpoints and we were officially tourists!

Several friends of ours had mentioned that instead of paying $40 to do the “official” tour of Atlantis, we could grab a taxi for $10 and go. So this is what we did. Our first cab driver stuffed about 10 of us into a minivan to head over. A very loud and fun gentleman, he clearly enjoyed talking about the Bahamas and the tourist aspect. Just about everyone we spoke to in the Bahamas were very proud of their home.

After a short drive, we arrived at Atlantis and began looking around. Many of the shops within the Hotel were very high end and we walked through the casino admiring sculptures and marble. We managed a peek at part of the aquarium that Atlantis is famous for including the biggest flipping Manta Ray I’ve ever seen. From side to side it was a great deal wider than I am tall. We decided that we would wonder around outside Atlantis and check out the waterpark, lazy river, and official aquarium tour. That idea quickly came to a screeching halt when we found out they wanted $110 a person to go into the water park. Um…how about a big FU there?

So after 90 minutes or so at Atlantis, we decided to head back to the downtown area. Once again we had another loud, outgoing taxi driver and we learned about some of the local areas such as the Fish Fry…which is a congregation of restaurants, the The Straw Market which is full of knockoff goods and locally produced touristy stuff, and of course many financial and diamond shops. The traffic in Nassau is very congested but people seemed to be friendly enough driving around. After poking our heads into a few shops, we picked a local restaurant to have lunch at where I sampled a delicious local soup!

Eventually we headed back to the ship where he had decided to partake in some of the activities on board in the evening. Our first event was the stand up comedian on board. He started off relatively slow and his material was weak…until he started to look for interaction from the audience. The best bits of his show were taking comments from the audience and running with them.

After the show, we had dinner and then spent the evening out by the pool and top deck of the ship before calling it a night.