Manzanillo

Manzanillo, the port here is quite a busy shipping port, many many cargo ships are around us, it is definitely not built as a cruise ship destination. 

Today was a fantastic day, great to be on shore with our toes in the sand.  We got off the ship today and just asked a taxi driver to take us to a beach. 

The taxi drive is about 30 minutes to La Audiencia beach.  This is exactly what we wanted!  This beach is not what I would call a real tourist beach.  There are some hotels along the cove, and some umbrellas and chairs set up, but it is really a local beach.  We are definitely in the minority here.  Many many Mexican families arrive throughout the day, and most of them bring everything with them for a day at the beach. Coolers, bags of food, cases of beer go by, one family even has a suitcase with them, would have been fun to see what was in that. 

We have a guy meet us as soon as we arrive on the beach to see if we want to do a snorkel tour, go for a private tour, go for a banana boat ride.... I think he would have done anything if we gave him some money.  We tell him our plan is to just play on the beach for the day. He does come back a couple of times during the day to see if we have changed our mind, but no luck from us today.  We spend the day alternating between playing Frisbee, going for a swim, playing a paddle ball game that Kyle bought for Liam in Feb in Mexico, and I may have squeezed a nap in here or there! 

It is quite quiet on the beach, our new found entrepreneur friend tells us it is quiet during the week, but very busy on week-ends  We can tell it must get much busier at times, there are dozens of umbrellas that are not opened in a back corner of the beach.  We paid $10 for 4 chairs and a huge umbrella that is large enough for us to all fit under, and we are right by the water with no one sitting behind us.  There is a family beside us that have even brought a little blow up pool for their baby to play in. She has a wonderful time in there for most of the day.  Their older daughter spends quite a bit of time going back and forth to the ocean getting water to fill the little pool.  The sand and beach here are much different, a much coarser sand, and not as pretty as the white beach sand that we had in Playa del Carmen last month.  But the beautiful cove is surrounded by mountains/cliffs make a very pretty picture. 

We order some guacamole, chops and salsa from a little restaurant on the beach. It is so good that we place a second order, lunch done.  A couple of margaritas that were not very good. We should have stuck to beer with André.  We ended up spending about 5 hours at the beach, have a fantastic time and back to the ship. 

We just walked up the road to one of the hotels that had security out front and he got a cab for us.  Luckily Liam is still pretty small and we can all fit in one small cab with Liam sitting on his Mom’s knee.  I haven't even looked for a seatbelt here, I don't want to know.  Today we are docked so we can see people boarding the ship, fun to watch how late people will push it.  We watched to see if anyone had to run, but it looks like everyone made it back on board fine.

Supper was very interesting tonight.  We have chosen anytime dining, so we are seated in different sections every night, with different waiters and different levels of service.  Tonight was an exception.  We started off with our bottle of wine. The waiter took a long time to open the bottle as it had a cork instead of a screw top. Then when he was pouring, he asked us to tell him when to stop.  We all had a chuckle over that when he left.  This guy brought back lots of memories of one of the waiters in Banff that we have worked with, his shirt tail was a little hanging out, just didn't quite look all put together, lots of laughs for us, not at this guy, but our memories of Banff. 

We get our main course served, after Liam ordering, I think, 4 starters again.  Then the guy walking around with a plate full of after dinner liquors arrives. I am not sure why he even came to our table at this time, but here he is. I have no idea what he did but somehow he managed to drop his whole tray of drinks into Joey’s plate.  The liquor went everywhere, from Joey’s hair, onto her clothes and into Joey’s and André’s wine glasses.  Joey was having enchiladas for supper, the empty liquor glasses ended up in her plate, so on top of the liquor Joey was also covered in tomato sauce, she was very pretty.  This caused quite a commotion as you can imagine, we had everyone from the head waiters, and maître d' arrive.  Joey had to leave to have a shower as she was such a mess. The rest of us stayed and finished our meals.  We asked the hostess for 2 new glass for the wine as it was full of liquor, she returned with 2 empty glasses, not sure what she was thinking, so we asked the maître d' for 2 new full wine glasses, which he had sent over.  Joey also is getting free cleaning of her clothes, by the time she got back to the room they had already let our room steward know that he was to pick up her clothes for cleaning.  Really it was handled very well, and of course if it was going to happen to anyone we were a good table to have it happen to. I'm sure they were not expecting quite as much laughter from it as we had. 

The maître d' had been over to our table to visit a couple of other nights already. He is from Sri Lanka, and his son graduated from University in Vancouver and is now working in IT there. I think he has a bit of a soft spot for Canadians, especially from BC.  André and the maître d' shared some horror stories from their dining room experiences serving.

After dinner we ran into Joey in the elevator on the way back to the dining room, we went to the buffet to see if she wanted more to eat, actually we just went to the dessert station on the buffet. 

Things are pretty boring after this. Not much going on as far as shows go, so we head back to our cabin and visit for a while, then another early night. Tomorrow is Puerto Vallarta and we have a private tour booked for the day.