Sad day, we had to come home after cruising to Mexico for a week. Regardless, it’s nice to be back in my bed, with my laptop, and be making money at work instead of just spending. (And we’re already planning the next trip!)
To give you a rundown of the trip, Sunday morning I flew down to LAX,
(that weird building that’s always in pictures of LAX)
where I met up with my parents
(Dad’s always so photogenic)
and we caught a shuttle to the port at Long Beach. On our last cruise, check-in seemed to take forever. We waited in one long line after another. This time, I think it took us an hour from start to finish. We handed our bags off, got in the check-in line, hopped over to security, then stood in a couple of fairly quick lines to get our ship cards, take a picture we will choose to never see, and then finally board the ship. We headed up to the Lido Deck (aka the buffet and lounge chair deck). We grabbed some chairs, lunch, and soaked up some sun before heading back to our room to unpack. Okay, really we hung out in the room 
waiting for our suitcases only to have the parents’ suitcases show up, they unpacked, we got ready for dinner, ran down to the help desk to find out where my suitcase was, discovered it had ended up in lost luggage land due to ALL of the tags getting ripped off (how does a sturdy plastic tag, secured with a zip tie get ripped off?), ran back to the room where I unpacked, and THEN we headed to dinner. This trip we were seated with two other families of three, one was a couple with his mother, the other a couple with their teenage son (who made friends and disappeared towards the end of the trip). We rolled back to our room and climbed into bed to watch a movie (I made it about 5 minutes, Ryan Reynolds hadn’t even turned into the Green Lantern yet before I gave up and passed out).
Day 2: Mom woke up with a migraine, so Dad and I went to breakfast, then grabbed a couple chairs on the Adults-Only deck and settled in for a day of reading. And in my case, sleeping. We changed sides of the ship one time to get away from shadows, and then went in to get ready for dinner. While we were getting ready Dad turned the tv to the channel which showed the bow of the ship and we found out that we had sailed right into a fog bank. It was super thick out, 
(See? Pea Soup)
but by the time dinner was done we’d sailed out again. Honestly, the entire day was blissful.
Day 3: Mom didn’t wake up with a migraine, which was great because it was our first day in Cabo San Lucas!
Cabo is right on the tip of the Baja Peninsula and the port is so small that the cruise ships have to anchor out in the bay and then you take a tender (either a life boat or, in our case, a smallish taxi from the shore).
We caught a tender and went to wander around the flea markets.
We grabbed lunch at the Hard Rock Café
and then hauled our tired feet back to the ship. We headed up to grab some lounge chairs and some sun (I took another nap) before dinner.
(the sunset over the bay that evening)
After dinner we caught a comedian (eh) and then headed over to the catch the hypnotist, who was hilarious.
Day 4: Our second day in Cabo
was much more eventful. We’d booked an excursion (which was originally on Day 3, but had been rescheduled to Day 4), so we caught the first tender over,
(the view from the tender as we came in)
checked in, then hung out until they called our group. We all (maybe 25 people?) tromped over to the boat, 
(le boat)
settled in (soda first thing in the morning? It wasn’t even 10 yet)
(we stopped by the arch on the way out)
and they took us about 45 minutes away to Chilean Bay 
where we kayaked for about half an hour, then went snorkeling (a first for me and mom) for a little while. It was freezing! We weren’t the first people out of the water, but when we couldn’t stop shaking after a while we headed in. The fish were gorgeous and it was a ton of fun, but the water was not nearly as warm as it was when we went swimming in Grand Turk last year. Back on the boat we dried off and had some freshly-made guacamole and salsa (amazing!) 
then very happily made our way back to the port.
(a whale’s tail on our way back into port)
Once there, we hit up one of the flea markets in order to get a few final things, then we headed back to the ship to lay out for a while (in my case, take a nap) until it was dinner time. I want to say this was the afternoon Dad and I headed over to the water slide to try it out. Nearly twice as long as last year, it was pretty fun. Obviously nothing like Seven Peaks, but it was fun to go down a couple times. I also think this might have been the night we grabbed a deck of cards and played rummy for a while before bed.
Check out this giant yacht that was out in the bay. It has a helicopter on! We saw some pretty nice boats on this trip, but this was, perhaps, the nicest.
Our ship, Carnival Splendor, anchored out in the bay.
It’s funny to see a boat that would not look out of place in Seward, docked in Cabo.
Day 5: Our day in Puerto Vallarta started early. We docked at around 8 and headed down to meet our excursion for the day. They took us over to the marina where we boarded a sailboat 
and we headed out for an hour and a half over to Banderas Bay. Sadly, there wasn’t enough wind to sail out, but we did get to see a bunch of whales (we started referring to it as “stalking” the whales) 
and we took a bunch of pictures of us just hanging out on the boat, 
(okay, I love this photo of Dad, but then I criticize it because the focus is not on the subject, but is instead on the sail behind him, then I always think that I like it like that, but then I come back to how it’s not “perfect.” I still really like it though.)
it was super relaxing and the crew was super attentive to anything we needed. At Banderas Bay we swam to shore, gathered sand and shells, then swam back out to the boat. 
They fed us lunch and then we sailed back to PV.
This is where things got bad, on the way back in we realized we were all really red. Like, REALLY RED. Apparently our blatant disregard of sunblock was backfiring badly. Mom and my feet were burned and starting to get puffy. Regardless of this, we caught a taxi who took us to a flea market in Old Town 
(this is probably one of the times I was shutting my eyes in terror. Those drivers are insane!)
We got everything we wanted, then made our way back to the ship.
(the port in PV)
After slathering ourselves in aloe, we had dinner and I’m sure we did something afterwards but the specifics escape me. (Mom-do you remember?)
Days 6 & 7: These two days we spent “at sea.” They actually resemble each other quite strongly, so I’m grouping them together. We wore comfy clothes, stayed mainly in the shade, put on lots of aloe, read a ton, played some Phase 10, ate chocolate on Day 7, and relaxed. It was glorious.
Day 7 was also the day we ran around taking pictures of the ship, because it had the strangest decor we’d ever scene. It looked like Liberace and Vegas had a love-child.
Notice the crazy light fixtures in the dining room.
The insane chair in outside the club (also notice that most of my red face is not lighting, but is in fact my spectacular sunburn)
(the utterly pink lobby area)
This ship was decorated by a man. You don’t believe me, do you? It was though.
This one took me a while to notice. The handrail (all the handrails in fact) was pink, the tiles were black, and the grout was neon green. The dining room had weird fried egg-like things on the ceiling, there were more pink tiger stripes than I would like to recall, and most the paintings looked like they were done by in a high school art class. By the non-artistic kids. It was really weird.
Sadly, this was the last sunset. We got up on Sunday, had breakfast, played a little rummy until disembarkation, then made our way to the airport. It all kinda still feels like a dream.
Things I loved about this trip:
- Being the person in the group who always turns the right direction out of the elevators and knew which decks went the length of the ship (aside from getting confused about which end of the ship the Serenity Deck was on, every darn time!)
- Having a great group of people to eat dinner with every night
- The wonderful dining staff, headed up by Role who always knew our names, knew what we ate for dinner the night before, never blinked when you said you wanted two appetizers, and thought I had cut my hair in Cabo (I’d pinned it up)
- Laughing with Mom constantly (about anything), with Dad looking at us like we were crazy as we laughed hysterically on our beds, or on our lounge chairs, or clutched the walls in the hallways for support, or the railings in the elevator, or the railings on the deck, or the table (what we were laughing about I can’t remember…)
- Spending time on the balcony with Dad looking for whales, or sea lions, or flying fish, or whatever we could possibly spot with the binoculars
- Taking a nap every afternoon and still being able to fall right to sleep at night
- Eating dessert every evening and not even thinking twice about it
- Having time to just read…for hours
- Laughing out loud at commercials on tv and having Mom turn to me and say, “I forget you don’t have real tv.” (Just a dvd player and laptop)
Okay, that’s it. My incredibly long, drawn-out, picture laden travelogue.
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