Tourist Day!

Generally, I would be having a youth retreat in Saipan.  However,  a group of the teens are off-island while I'm here and arrive the day I leave.  So I decided to kidnap the two girls left behind for some quality adventures. (And to build relationships.) We decided to pose as tourists and do all the touristy sites of Saipan.  

We kicked off with a circle of the CNMI Veterans Cemetery.  This was built after I lived on the islands, and I don't recall visiting it until Tourist Day.  It's a beautiful cemetery. 

After the cemetery, we went to Banzai Cliff.  The girls told me that last time they were at Banzai I had taken them there at night when they were little girls and they were very scared.  (I don't remember this.  But I felt better when they told me Laura [not me] and Josiah were there too, so maybe it wasn't totally my crazy idea???)  The views are spectacular from here.  It has been so windy this week (thank you, Jesus for the breeze!!!) that the waters were very rough. But rough waters also mean no sea turtle sightings. 

From Banzai we headed over to the Grotto.   They have really expanded the grotto lookouts, improved the stairs going down to the bottom, and added picnic tables.  Very nice.  (Going down to the actual Grotto is amazing. The girls didn't want to do the stairs and we were trying to beat the rain and the clock, so we didn't go down.  You will have to check out a previous year's post for those views.)

From the grotto we catch Bird Island.  Today may have been the prettiest I have ever seen Bird Island--it was as if it was glowing.

We had two more stops we had planned to make: Suicide Cliff and Last Command Post.  However, the rain was starting.  We were able to catch a quick photo at the Saipan sign before the skies completely unloaded on us.  

Even thought we didn't make it to the top of Suicide Cliff, we did get some really nice pictures from afar looking up.