Back in San Diego

Sad day, we have to be in the theatre by 7AM to clear US customs, all non us citizens are here, there are quite a few of us.  No one is allowed to get off the ship until we have all cleared customs, of course by 8AM they are still paging guests to come down. They really need to find a better way to do this, maybe charge those that don’t show up on time. 

We get off the ship around 8:30 and then André, Liam and I walk to get our rental car which is about a mile away.  We pick Joey and Kyle up with the luggage back at the cruise terminal and off we go exploring.  We start off by driving to La Jolla to see the seals.  The ocean is much different than last week when Andre and I were here, the surf is up and there are surfers out enjoy the waves. 

From here we drive along the coast and stop a couple of times to see the waves and surfers, then we stop at Mission Beach and walk around the amusement park and visit a few souvenir shops. 

From here we move on to Old Town for some lunch.  This is where California was founded, and I really like walking around here, though it is really touristy.  We had a fantastic Mexican meal, and just fun walking from one shop to another. 

We then visited Balboa Park to finish the day

It is very cold here today, but we all know it is going to be worse tomorrow.  We are back at our hotel.  We’re planning on leaving the hotel tomorrow around 4:30 am. It is going to be a long day.  Right now we are all in Joey’s room watching TV, we all ate lunch so late and ate so much that we will be skipping dinner. Liam is a little disappointed, but popcorn will have to do for him.  We’ve had a great visit, but of course it has gone by far too quickly.  It will be hard saying good-bye tomorrow. Usually we always have plans for when we will see each other again when we say good-bye, but not this time.  Liam has informed us that it is our turn to go to Fernie next, guess he is right, now we just have to figure out when.  Just looked up and Joey and Kyle are asleep on the bed, André is watching TV, and Liam hasn’t stopped talking. He wants to know how many words I have to write in my trip reports, he has to do 100 words per day for school.    Time to sign off, get ready for our early start tomorrow, and start dreaming about our next trips....(notice it is still plural)

Last sea day

Wake up this morning to a howling wind and much cooler temperatures. I don't think we'll be able to spend any time outdoors today, which is disappointing for our last day in nice weather.  The wind has definitely made things a lot cooler. 

They've delivered all our debarking information so I guess it is coming to an end.  We need to be in customs at 7AM because we are not American. Kyle is going to love this early time. 

We've been to lunch and had something from the chocolate buffet. I've also lost $10 in the slot machines, no luck for me.  Joey and I went to a talk from the cruise director, really a Q&A about ship life, it was pretty interesting, reminded us of our days at the Banff Springs. 

Nothing else much planned for the day except getting books read, and some packing at some point.  Haven't seen much of the kids today, probably won't before supper. Nothing really exciting happened for the rest of the day.  It never warmed up, so we did not get to enjoy another day in the sun, or our balcony again. 

We went later for dinner, and it was .5 hour wait, so we decided to just go to the buffet instead, the first time we have done this for dinner all week.  The kids had been eating all afternoon and did not want supper anyway.  Back to the cabins to start getting packed, we have opted for taking our luggage off the ship ourselves, which means we don't have to put it out tonight for the porters to pick it up.

Cabo San Lucas, Revisted

Today we are not sure what we have planned.  I had booked a tour, but I wasn't sure if it was still on or not.  I never printed off anything about the tours, so I was never sure exactly what they included, or how long they were for, so it was always a bit of an adventure. 

Today we get off on the 7:30 tender for our  9 AM tour.  There are no lines for us at this time of day, and today they told us to just go and get in line instead of having to get a tender ticket with a number on it first. 

So we arrive at the pier where we are supposed to get our private sailing tour at about 8:15, lots of time, and we're still not sure if we even have the tour.  We see a guy with a shirt with the company name on it. So I go and ask and he takes my voucher and says we will be ready to go in about 5 minutes. Yeah we don't have to plan anything else for today. 

It is a 3 hour tour on a nice 28 foot sailboat.  We start off by the first mate telling us a little about the morning and then asking if we want anything to drink as it is open bar, André is now a happy man.  Margaritas at 9AM, where is Lima when he could use a drinking buddy. 

We set sail and go around to the arch and see lovers beach, and divorce beach, then the last rock on the Baja as well as a sea lion colony.  Then we go out to look for a whale that is on the Pacific side.  It is much rougher here, and the kids really like the bouncing until the wind and spray starts as well.  We do spot 3 hump back whales again, it is really fantastic, except there are about 8 other boats out there with us that definitely take away from the experience, especially when a couple of the boats are huge catamarans doing a whale watching tour.  I did see the first whale tail though, so it was worth it for me.

We sail back slowly to shore and we decide to pass on the snorkeling because it was just too busy, instead they let us off to swim to shore on a quiet beach.  Liam screams the whole way in, salt water on the toe didn’t feel good, but we made it.  Andre want back out to the boat to get us a round of margaritas, and we just played on the beach with a Frisbee and the racket and balls again for about 45 minutes. 

We swam back to the boat and they had prepared snacks for us, sailed back to the pier and the end to a fantastic morning. 

We then walked back to the ship, along the way looking for glasses for Kyle, as well as new ones for me as my new Prada glasses from Playa broke.  I'm thinking of returning them to Prada but I didn't get my $10 receipt when I bought them.  No luck with any sunglasses for Kyle, but I got myself another cheap pair. 

Back on board with not too long of a wait for a tender. Tonight is our second formal night, again we are not too formal, but we didn't wear bathrobes to dinner so they let us in.  After dinner we went to a magic and comedy show that was pretty good, then to a comedy show that was terrible.  We'll call it another early night.