Lots of stuff to do, but I will post blog entries covering the remainder of our trip in the next few days. I also hope to getting around to posting pictures from the wedding and from our trip, but that might have to wait until after we're in Ireland. There's an awful lot of stuff to do before we leave next Saturday! Morgan
– note: this post was written while aboard the cruise ship on the 17th of July and posted on the 19th of July after arriving back – Well, Diane and I are now waiting for debarkation from the ship. It's awfully early -- 7:30 in the morning, and we've been up since 6 so that we could have breakfast. I don't have much else to do, so I figured I'd get caught up with the blog posting.
I left off before the second musical show called "Spin". This time around, the show was themed around a wheel with different destinations on it. After each song, they spun the wheel to get a new destination and they'd do a song around that theme. There was quite a few places they did, most of which were in the United States. We arrived a bit late, but caught songs themed around Texas, New York, New Orleans, Puerto Rico and a few others that I can't remember. It was pretty fun actually.
After the show, we headed off to dinner. By this point we'd started to get to know our dinner partners John and Dawnyelle. Our dinner conversation was pretty fun, and we had a pretty good time. There was escargo on the menu, which is something I've never tried. John mentioned that they were there, and then it became something we had to try. So the four of us split an order of escargo. It was sure buttery and garlicy ... and you really couldn't taste what the snail tasted like. It kind of had a texture similar to calimari, which I suppose makes sense. So, one thing off the list of things to try! For a main course, both Diane and I had some battered fish and shrimp. It was fairly tasty, although some of our other dinners were better.
After dinner, rather than going to see the "R-rated" hypnosis show, we decided to just head to bed. The next day would be our Ensenada excursion, so we didn't want to stay up too late for a show that maybe wasn't that exciting. I imagine if he standup guy was back, we might've stayed up for him.
We slept in a little more than we had when we hit Cabo, but that's partly because our excursion didn't leave until 10:45. This time, we went to have breakfast at Tiffany's (that's what the buffet restaurant is called) and then got off the ship well in advance of our tour. It was a nice day though, so we wandered around the little market, and sat in the shade for a little while before heading off on our tour.
The tour we had signed up for was a kayaking trip -- the first leg of which was a one hour bus ride to the site. The main tourist attraction in Ensenada is a natural blowhole called El Bufadora. This formation is a place where air pressure builds up in a natural pocket and every few seconds the blowhole sprays water up high into the air. Our kayaking would bring us within a few metres away fromwhere the water exits.
The bus ride was fairly nice. Our tour guide was very excited and talked almost all the way there. She told us about the city of Ensenada, about the state we were in, and about Mexico. She gave us shopping and bargaining advice. She did a pretty good job, and her English was really quite good so it was pretty informative.
After getting off the bus, we got a quick lesson in kayaking from a friendly guy named Carlos. From there, we walked a little ways down to the beach where a bunch of two-man kayaks were sitting. One by one, the kayak tour guides pushed each boat into the water where we paddled out a little ways. The water was beautifully clear, so we could see quite a ways down. The biggest feature in the water was by far the large kelp forests -- our kayaking took us through several patches of the stuff. It's pretty crazy how large these plants must be. We couldn't see the bottom of the ocean anywhere, but the kelp grows on the bottom and extends their branches to the top of the water and they extend across the water for quite a ways. A pretty incredible sight.
On the way out to the blowhole we spotted several dolphins. It's pretty cool to see them swimming along not really all that far away. The trip to the blowhole was pretty short, but we sat in the water for awhile to watch it. I risked bringing my little camera along so I took it out and took several photos and videos of the blowhole in action. It was pretty neat to see it from our vantage point, and I'm pretty sure that's the best way to see it. The vantage point from land really wasn't nearly as good since you don't get to see the bottom of the spray.
After the tour guides took anyone who wanted to closer to the blowhole, we started paddling back to the beach. On the way back, Diane and I spotted a seal! It was awfully cute. On our way back, we'd see it several times coming up for air, but we never managed to get a photo of it. We got surprisingly close to it, actually -- and every time he came up we paddled a little closer. I wonder if it thought we were stalking it.
The tour guides helped us get up on the beach from our kayaks and we walked back to the bus to wash off the sand and dry off a bit. The bus tour guide was very excited to take us to the market leading towards the blowhole -- so even though it wasn't officially part of our tour, we got an extra hour to wander through the market. It was quite interesting ... the people there were quite eager to sell us stuff. At times they were quite pushy. In preparation for our kayaking, Diane and I forgot to pack some money with us, so we actually couldn't buy anything. It was kind of amusing being hassled into someone's store to look at their stained glass, but not having money to purchase anything. Of course, the guy there didn't know that ... but we did. Some of the stuff on sale was pretty odd. There were several drug stores down the stretch selling all kinds of spam-subject drugs like viagra and cialis. One guy went so far as to touch my arm and say something along the lines of "you could go all-night baby". I was a little creeped out to say the least. Makes a good story though.
We wandered through the market for a little ways, taking some free samples of churros, and homemade bread. It helped us last until we got back to the ship. We got back to the bus well before our 3:00 meetup time, and waited around for the rest of our tour people to come back from the market. There was a group of four that were late, and we came very close to leaving them behind but thankfully they got back just in time. The bus ride back was kind of relaxing and I had a very quick nap.
Arriving back at the ship, we cleaned up and then wandered around the ship for a bit. There was supposed to be ball room dance music playing in one of the lounges, but when we showed up there was nobody there. I guess nobody showed up, so they stopped (or never started?). So we hung around for a little bit. Diane had a nap, before we went off to dinner. Our last dinner with John and Dawnyelle was fun. We exchanged pictures and email addresses. Maybe they'll come visit us in Ireland some day. I had veal parmigiani for dinner, and Diane had the salmon. Both were pretty tasty. We chatted for awhile after dinner and then wandered back to our room where we stayed for a little while before the 10:30 show that evening. The neat thing about the last show was they had been doing auditions at karaoke for some well known artists like Garth Brooks, Brittany Spears, Madonna, Elton John, Elvis, Ricky Martin, etc. The best ones were picked and they put on a show where these people got to get up on stage dressed up like the artists they were impersonating. It was actually pretty fun. The guy who did Garth Brooks sounded almost exactly like him which was pretty awesome. The rest of them ranged in quality a bit, and some definately looked a bit nervous which is totally understandable. It was a neat idea that worked pretty well I think.
After the show was over, Diane and I went off to collapse. In order to get up in time for breakfast, we had to get up pretty early so we set an early wakeup call at 6am. It came too fast, but both of us woke up pretty quickly. We showered, packed ourselves up, and moved out of our room in pretty short order and made it to breakfast a little before 7:00. Breakfast was rather nice -- we went for the dining room where we got full service. It didn't take too long for us to get our croissants, eggs benedict, fruit juice, and coffee. It was pretty tasty, but by the time we were finished and sat around for a bit, it was only 7:45.
So now we're sitting in one of the lounges waiting for our debarkation number to be called. They've gone through numbers 1-9 so far, and we're number 16. Once we get called we can head off the ship and head to the airport where we'll wait until 3:20 to leave San Diego. It's gonna be a bit of a long day methinks. Still, it's a bit hard to believe our honeymoon is almost over. In some ways it'd be nice to stick around a bit longer, but it'll be nice to be back home too.
Morgan
-- note: this post was written while aboard the cruise ship on the 15th of July and posted on the 19th of July after arriving back -- To continue where I left off, Diane and I headed off to the captain's reception to go enjoy some pre-dinner cocktails and appetizers. They introduced the senior officers to us, and we got to hear more about what was coming up in the next day or two. Shortly after the reception, we wandered over to the dining hall to have our "Cruise Elegant" dinner. We had lobster and shrimp, which was quite tasty ... both Diane and I particularly enjoyed the shrimp -- they were quite large and juicy! For dessert, I had a chocolate melting cake which was wonderfully chocolatey. The loud woman was there again, but she wasn't as bad as she had been the night before at dinner which was a welcome relief.
After Dinner there was a show in the main show room called Rythm, so we wandered over that way and found ourselves a seat to watch the musical. It was okay, but I was a little weirded out by some of the costumes the dancers were wearing. There was some questionable choices I believe ... some of them were just very strange!
Anyways, after that, there was a midnight "R-rated" standup comedy show by the same guy who did the standup show in the welcome show on the first night. It was quite a good show actually. He did a pretty decent job, and we laughed at a fair number of his jokes. He did get a heckler though from the audience which was rather interesting. The heckler really didn't have much content, but she certainly had a lot to say. The guy handled her about as well as you might expect, and eventually she shut up. The last joke of the night was pretty funny again, so he once again did a good job of ending his show on a high note.
We headed off to bed right away after the show since we had to get up early the next morning to get off the ship in Cabo San Lucas. Before going to bed though, we filled out the continental breakfast room service form so that we could get something to eat before heading off the ship. The room service on the ship is complimentary, which is pretty sweet. So we figured this would give us a backup plan just in case we slept in.
The next morning we got our wakeup call and stumbled out of bed and had breakfast. Bagels and creamcheese, some fruit, coffee, and some smoked salmon. A nice filling breakfast before our busy day in Cabo San Lucas. We finished off breakfast and went down to get off the ship. There is no concrete dock in Cabo, so we anchored in the bay and were brought to shore by tender boats. The first thing we had to find was somebody under the "Canyon Canopy" sign for our excursion.
Our excursion was a canyon zip-line, rock climbing and rappelling trip. The first stage of which was to get in a van and drive for about an hour out to the site. Our driver, Alex, was a bit of a wild driver. He sped down the highway a bit faster than I would've liked and tail gated a lot more than I would've liked, but we made it there safely in the hot desert.
After a quick safety and introductory session, we started the trek. It was quite a lot of fun! There were several rope ziplines, a rock climbing wall, a "commando bridge" which turned out to be a rope across a canyon that you had to walk on holding onto a second rope, and a rappel. It was a lot of fun, and pretty wild.
It took probably 2 and half hours or so to go through the canyon, and we were pretty tired after the whole thing. They fed us PB&J sanwhiches, fresh fruit, and chips and salsa -- and most importantly ice cold water. The only bad thing about the trip was they wouldn't let me take my camera on it. They claimed safety concerns, which were probably fair to some extent, but I would've loved to have it with me. As a "replacement", one of the people with them brought his camera along and took pictures of people as they navigated the course. The problem was, he wasn't very good at getting good photos, and didn't take any photos of the scenery (which was really what I was interested in). Plus, to makes matter worse, they charged $12 a photo, or $79 for a CD full of ... 8 photos. Sound ridiculous to you? Yeah, to me too. I'm convinced that if the photographer took more pictures of the surrounding area, and sold a CD full of all the photos you liked for $30, just about everyone would buy one. I would, and I'm a cheap Canadian.
But that's my rant. We were driven back to Cabo San Lucas where we went straight to the ship via a tender. After cleaning up, and taking a quick nap, we went off to see the hypnosis show. Diane and I arrived a bit late, so we found a seat a little on the side, but we caught most of the show. It was mildly amusing, but I guess hypnotism doesn't appeal to me quite as much as it does to some.
Afterwards it was dinner time so we went and enjoyed quite a few helpings of appetizers before the main course. Only one of the other couples at our table showed up. I figure the other ones got a little hammered in Cabo :).
Rather than attempt to attend any other shows that night after dinner, Diane and I retired to bed much earlier and went to bed early after our big excursion. We slept right in to ten and from then relaxed for a little while longer before going up for another sit down lunch in the dining room. There wasn't a lot on the schedule today that we felt we wanted to do, so after waffling a bit, we went up to the deck to read and relax in the sun. After a couple hours, I had got a bit pink from the sun, and decided to come in for a bit. I hit up the pokerpro automated poker table for a little while. I didn't make out very well, but I got a chance to give it a try anyways, so that was cool. I went back to join Diane and we wandered up for the end of high tea.
Again, today's schedule hasn't really appealed to us that much so we just kind of hung out for a bit and eventually ended up back at our cabin, so that's where we are right now. There's another musical show at 7:00 before dinner so we'll probably do that. At the moment we're watching finding forrester on the cabin television. I love that movie.
Morgan
-- note: this post was written while aboard the cruise ship on the 13th of July and posted on the 19th of July after arriving back -- Diane and I are on a cruise ship waiting for the captain's reception and formal dinner. This is the 2nd night of our honeymoon cruise, and I've disconnected myself from the interwebs for the duration of the trip. While internet is available, I don't really like paying the premium for it at this point so I'll just check email when I get home.
So yesterday was our first cruise day. We hung out in our hotel room in the morning for a little while and had breakfast before checking out right before noon and wandering over to the dock where the Elation was sitting there waiting to be boarded. After a surprisingly smooth check-in process, we boarded the ship and the first thing we did was pursue food. Our room wasn't going to be ready for another 45 minutes or so, so we needed to pass some time which we did by finding a table in Tiffany's restaurant.
There was a lot of people there for lunch, so we just kind of hung out and took food from the short lineup areas which included a fruit and salad bar and the 24 hour soft ice cream bar. That was pretty fun. After relaxing a bit, we went down to check out our cozy little room. It's nothing particularly special, but it's certainly comfortable. There's even a fake window with curtains to make it look like a hotel room (I'm not sure it's really all that necessary).
After stowing our carry on luggage in our room, we wandered out to explore the ship a little. This is our first cruise so we needed to check out how the ship was organized and what it had to offer. I don't know how the Elation compares to other ships, but it has a pretty wide array of rooms and conveniences. The cabins are down low, with our cabin on the Upper Deck (3rd floor from the bottom of the passenger cabins, with one above ours). On the Empress Deck, there's a bar in the middle in a wide open room where you can see all the floors higher than it. A couple floors up is the promenade deck which is the only floor where you can walk from one length of the ship to the other without going through cabin areas. Most of the action goes on either on the promenade deck or up or down one floor. The restaurants are one floor below on the Atlantic deck, and the pool and buffet (with the 24 hour pizza and ice cream bar) one floor up on the Lido deck.
We found out most of the information by joining a whirlwind tour starting at 2:45. After the tour, we had a few moments before joining the people for the mandatory safety drill. That was a whole lot of boring-ness, but I imagine it's a good idea so people know what to do if something goes wrong. Not that that's high on the expectation list.
We were supposed to leave at 4:00, but we didn't quite get going right away. Eventually though, we did set off and Diane and I watched the depart on the top deck at the rear of the ship with a good view of the rock/blues band that played for us while we set off. We watched the ship negotiate the bay outside San Diego and after a little while we were cruising down the west coast.
After awhile we returned to our room to get unpacked and do a bit of laundry so we could make it through the remaining days with enough clean clothes. We have the late dinner session at 8:15, so there was lots of time to fit in laundry and we basically relaxed for awhile while waiting for the clothes to be ready.
We headed up for dinner a little early and found our assigned table. There was a nice couple already seated when we got in so we chatted a bit. Another couple came by not too much later and they basically took over the conversation. Actually, it was the woman who took over the conversation. She chatted, loudly, throughout just about the entire dinner which wasn't all that pleasant. My poor right ear :(.
Dinner was actually pretty good. I got Fried shrimp for an appetizer and pan-seared fish (Starts with a T, white fish) for my main course. It was quite tasty! Diane got portobello mushroom for an appetizer and steak for her main course. The steak was okay, but it was no Alberta beef. Dessert was also pretty good. Diane got some cheesecake, and I got some sort of black forest concoction. Both were pretty good, although I think Diane won with the better dessert this go around.
Immediately after dinner there was a welcome aboard show, so we went there after a quick stop at the Piano Bar. In that room there literally is a piano bar - a bar with a bunch of keys on it. Diane and I both enjoyed that a lot.
The welcome show was interesting. There was some rather high energy dancing, and singing, and then a comedian came on. He wasn't too shabby -- he got a few laughs out of us, though we've seen better. Tonight he's going to do an R-rated show ... we'll see how that goes.
After the welcome show, we came back to our cabin to collapse and get a bit of rest before the next full day at sea.
This morning we woke up and went to have a little bit of breakfast from the buffet. I started out with a slice of pizza, and then a bowl of fruit from the buffet. Next, we consulted our list of stuff to do and ended up going to the shore excursion talk. We got some tips on what to expect on the excursions and some descriptions of some of the excursions. We'd already chosen ours, so we just went to listen and see if there was any good advice for us to check out.
After that we ended up heading to the dining room for lunch. I didn't realize that we'd have a formal dining option for lunch, but it turns out there was, and I'm glad we checked that out. It was rather good! I had some more pan seared fish (a different one this time), with some california rolls for an appetizer and creme caramel for dessert. Mmm, tasty. Although the california rolls were strangely sweet.
Unfortunately, lunch made us miss the Bar Mixology session. Whoops. But we did go on to a wine tasting seminar which was rather cool. We tried 5 different types of wines. Two whites, a white zinfandel, and two reds. I learned a little bit, but still have a lot to learn about wine.
We hung out for a bit before heading to high tea back at the piano bar. We got some tea and several little tea snacks. Lots of little tasty things including cucumber sandwiches, smoked salmon on toast, and a bunch of sweets. After tea, we went up and played some win, lose, or draw -- pretty much pictionary. Our team won. Both Diane and I contributed a bunch to our cause by stealing a point from the other team with "Jockey", and drawing birdhouse (me), walking the dog (diane), and sandcastles (also diane). That was pretty fun.
So now it's just about time for the captain's reception and I need to change into my formal clothes (just a nice shirt and pants). It's been a fun couple days and we're both excited to hit Cabo San Lucas in the morning to do our zipline and rapelling session. It should be lots of fun!
Morgan
Diane and I slept in again, quite a bit later than I figured we might given that we went to bed super early. I guess we needed to catch up on some sleep. We wandered down for the complimentary continental breakfast which was alright, but not spectacular. Then we headed off to the zoo! It was just one bus from downtown, so we picked up a transit all-day pass and rode the number 7 bus from downtown all the way to the zoo. The San Diego Zoo is *huge*. It was very overwhelming at first, but luckily our tickets gave us a free bus tour throughout the park so we decided that the best way to start was to take the bus tour around to get a feel for what the park had to offer. The bus tour was at least 20 minutes, and I was able to get a few decent photos with my telephoto lens from the top of the double decker bus.
After the bus tour, we started to wander a bit and saw a large number of exhibits and took a lot of pictures. Diane and I teamed up -- she wrote down what the animal's names are while I was taking pictures, so hopefully we have most of my pictures labeled with the actual names of the animals.
What were my favourite ones? I think I liked the meerkats a lot. The Pandas were awfully cute, and it was pretty fun to watch the monkeys swing around in their little playgrounds. Also, the many deer related animals: the gazelles, the antelope, etc were really cute. Especially the baby ones. One of my other favourite things was walking through the aviaries. These were so much more picture friendly than some of the other ones where the bars just got in the way of the little birds.
We stopped for lunch halfway through the park at the treehouse cafe. It wasn't all that great, but it was okay. I had a meatball sub and Diane had a bread bowl full of chili.
Wandering through the rest of the zoo took us until after 4:00. One of the highlights in the afternoon was riding the Skyfari tram from one end of the zoo up to the other. It was quite a nice view from up there! We could easily have spent more time at each exhibit or made an effort to see some of the shows they put on there, but we basically explored fairly quickly and took pictures at many of the exhibits.
We headed back to the hotel and got lucky that the bus arrived right away. We sauntered back to the hotel and changed and consulted directions to an improv comedy show we picked up a pamphlet for. Dinner was at Anthony's Fish Grotto which apparently has been around for a long time. It was quite good -- I had a plate of fried fish, scallops, and shrimp. The coleslaw they gave me was some of the best I think I've ever had. It had bits of pineapple in it, and the cabbage was very very fresh.
After dinner it looked like there was enough time to try and find the improv comedy place, so we boarded a trolley car which on the inside looked startlingly like the LRT cars in Edmonton. We took it two stops and found the comedy club with time to spare. The improv show was very similar to the guys in Edmonton who do Improvaganza. It was a pretty fun show, although I kind of felt that the referee needed to do less talking and explaining the games and more time letting the improv people improvise. Still, it was quite fun.
We got back on the train and headed back to sleep. We have to check out of our hotel by noon, but the cruise ship check-in time is 12:30 so I think we've got a pretty good plan of attack there!
I'll probably be disconnected from the internet for the majority of the cruise. I have no idea how much internet will cost on the ship, but I have a feeling it might be expensive. I'll continue to type blog posts though and I'll post them when I get the chance. If the cost of internet there is reasonable I might jump online once in awhile and post something, but for the most part I think I will disconnect myself.
Morgan