Sail Away, Sail Away, Sail Away!

Joe and I were finally able to take some time off from work and get away on a cruise together. This was the first vacation that we have taken by ourselves since we got married. It was so nice to be able to spend time one on one and just relax together. We left from Long Beach on Monday afternoon. We were able to get on the boat earlier than we had expected and scope things out. The rest of the day was just full of relaxing and getting used to our new home for the next few days. When we left the port I could feel the boat moving. Unfortunately I am one of those people who has to deal with motion sickness. Dinner that night wasn't very fun because of it, we ended up having to leave a little early and go back to our room to lay down. The next morning we stopped at Catalina Island. It was a lot bigger than we had expected. The island was beautiful, very green. We had planned on renting a golf cart to explore the island but unfortunately when we got there we found out that you had to be 25. Bummer! We explored as much as we could on foot, just walked up a few of the streets and checked out some of the houses. Then we walked to the Catalina Casino, it is a beautiful building. It is no longer a casino, it is used as a theater now. After that Joe decided he wanted to search for crabs. I was surprised how many we were able to find. As we had been walking down one of the streets we noticed a run down miniature golf course. We decided to head back up there and try it out. It was actually a pretty fun course! By then we had had all the fun we could on the island and decided to head back to the boat.
These are some of the houses on the island.
This is the view of the island as our boat was bringing us to the shore.
This is the old Catalina Casino.
Here is one of the crabs that we found...pretty ugly things!!
We were trying to take the picture by ourselves!! This was as good as it got!

That night was very rocky!! You would watch people walk past and they couldn't even walk straight...and it wasn't all from the alcohol. So once again we went to bed early. The next day was Ensenada. A dirty little town in Mexico...it kind of reminded me of Tijuana. We didn't have any plans for what we were going to do. We ended up getting a taxi to take us to La Bufadora, the blowhole, and the open air market. The blow hole was pretty neat. Neither of us had ever seen one before. There are only 2 others in the world. Then we made our way through the market. The people would not leave us alone. Everyone wanted us to come in to their shops and bargain with them. I'm sure we made a few of them mad. But we got what we were after and headed back to our taxi. He dropped us off in their downtown shopping district and we decided we needed to get some lunch...nothing better than McDonald's! We didn't quite trust any of the other restaurants there. We walked around a little more, I finally found someone selling chicklets...I love that gum...and we headed back to the ship for a peaceful day of no rocking...we were docked until 10 PM.
Here is La Bufadora. It's hard to see how it works, but water from the ocean builds up and shoots up next to the rocks.
This is the lovely open air market where I learned to talk people down on prices...I was a little intimidated at first!
This is a 500 lb Mexican flag that was right by where our ship was docked. Joe is the amazing photographer!

That night we went to a few shows. There was a really cool magician that I could have watched for hours. Then a comedian came on. Joe thought he was pretty funny. They also had Bingo. It was amazing to see how many people were willing to pay $20 for 3 cards of Bingo and only one person wins! No thanks!!! It was so nice to be able to have a night that we didn't have to spend in bed feeling crappy! The next day was our day at sea. I thought I was going to be miserable all day, but the boat wasn't moving very fast so I didn't feel it much. We laid out on the top deck and just relaxed all day...and all night. We ordered room service and watched LOST...I know, pathetic, but we couldn't miss it!!

The sunset was amazing!

The next morning we were off the ship by 7 AM and on our way home. We were ready to be off the boat! We ended up having a wonderful time together! I wouldn't have wanted to share this time with anyone but Joe!!!