We walked quite few blocks after descending the Queen's staircase to get to the base of the bridge that crosses over to Paradise Island.  And here we thought we were already in Paradise...

In the photo above, all the mail boats, which go out to the more remote islands, sit at the dock because it was a Sunday.  The tall pinkish buildings are parts of Atlantis.

<< In this panorama shot, you can see one of the cruise ships at the right and the tall water tower toward the middle left of the horizon.  It had been a long walk already, but we continued across the bridge to the Atlantis resort and casino.

Next to a perfect white sand beach, an outdoor bar looks like a confection made from scallop and conch shells. >>

There were some significant non-glass pieces as well such as this 20'-long sea monster/dragon.

After wandering around looking at the art, but not stopping to play the games or slots in the casino, we headed back to the boat. We decided to take a water taxi back, because we'd been on our feet for hours.

While waiting for the water taxi, you could purchase a fruit smoothie with or without rum.  The ride back offered a different view of the port.

As we came around the cruise ships, we were surprised to see this Greenpeace boat 
with its tall crows nest used for whale spotting.

We noticed these mean-looking cats on all the lines to shore. At first we were stymied, but then we realized that these are baffles to keep rats and mice from walking up the lines to come aboard the ship.  The other cruise ships had baffles, too, but no cat images.  We wondered whether there are some studies proving the effectiveness of the cats... >>  

<< That evening we celebrated our 8th anniversary. Wow has it been that long??  

Then it was a day at sea as the ship navigated to St. Thomas. Quite relaxing and enjoyable.  We did some bird watching out at sea; we watched a brown booby ride the bow airwaves. It could fly without flapping its wings until it dove for fish.  We thought that it was diving with some small birds closer to the water, but when we watched from deck six, the promenade deck, we saw that those smaller birds were actually flying fish. 

As we got closer to land, we also saw a masked booby.
We'd seen close relatives of these birds, the Nazca and blue-footed boobies from very close up on our Galapagos trip.