Grand Turk

The Island of Grand Turk has free-roaming donkeys along with pristine beaches for all. The donkey’s origins can be traced back to the 17th and 18th centuries when they were brought to the island to work as pack animals for the labor-intensive sea salt industry. They were used to haul heavy loads of salt from local salinas (salt flat mines) to waiting ships. The donkeys are roaming all about the island as you move about from place to place on the island.

We were cruising together with 3 other families (party of 9), so we had been on the waiting list for a 6-seat golf cart tour for almost 2 months prior to our cruise! (Warning: be sure to book your golf carts well in advance!) God was blessing us, because the night before we entered port, we were up on deck 10 forward in the games area playing a wild family session of Mahjong, when the nearby excursion desk contacted me and said that there had been some cancellations and that I had finally made it to the top of the wait list, but no 6-seat carts were available and asked if we were willing to take a 4-seat golf cart on the excursion, we gladly accepted and us and 1 of the other couples greatly enjoyed our golf cart excursion day in Grand Turk!

The other 2 couples stayed around the Grand Turk Cruise Port Center which has some great amenities available. It also boasts that it has the only Starbucks in the Caribbean, and of course it is painted a great shade of Caribbean pink instead of Seattle green.

The golf cart excursion was not exactly what I thought it was in that I thought it was only a golf cart rental, but it was actually a full excursion where we had to play follow the leader all around the island and we stopped at various spots for quick stops. For our tour, we stopped first at the John Glenn Friendship 7 memorial site near the Airport, then we stopped near the Grand Turk sign for a quick photo op, and then we drove through historic Cockburn Town past the famous prison and past the salinas. We saw lots of cool donkeys along the way! Toward the end of the excursion, we stopped at the Tipsy Turtle beach club for 1.5 hours of the 3 hour total tour time.

After our excursion we returned to the cruise ship port area and enjoyed some shopping at the local market area and in a few of the cruise port shops, then we tried some conch fritters which were awesome!