Honeymooning

We drove to California the week after our wedding and stayed at my grandparents house for a night. The next morning, after realizing we had forgotten our birth certificates in Utah, my friend Laura frantically searched every nook and cranny of our house to try to find them and fax them to us. After about two hours, luckily her one year old son crawled under our couch and found them. Then we got lost in Pasadena on our way to Harbor Blvd in L.A.

Somehow we made it safely (and legally) aboard the ship and cruised to San Diego. Robert was excited to be back near his old stomping ground. We rode the bus to the Museum in Balboa Park and saw an exhibit on the Dead Sea Scrolls. Seaport Village was the place for lunch- a yummy cafe built right on a pier. We filled up, since our dinner rotation on the ship was at 8:00 p.m. Good thing they fed us a 3 course meal! The food was definitely the best part about the whole cruise.

Catalina Island was our second stop. Robert remembered canoeing there on a Boy Scout trip in his youth. Ah youth. The city is basically built right up the side of the hill- very interesting. We went snorkeling in the 62 (felt like 42!) degree water. Thank goodness for full wetsuits. Yes, it was frigid, thanks for asking. And despite Rob's mask not repelling water/fogginess, we enjoyed ourselves. Too bad there were no showers for us when we were done- the water was nasty. So, we scrubbed as well as we could in the bathrooms, then grabbed a quick bite to eat, did a little shopping and skedaddled back to the ship to shower.

The last port was Ensenada, Mexico. The sign for the "New Shopping Center" made us laugh, since it looked pretty old. In fact, most everything we saw was old, run-down, and filthy. Sad. We took a bus tour to "La Bufadora", which means "Buffalo Snort". It's one of three natural blowholes in the world. (Wikipedia... "La Bufadora is the second largest blowhole in the world, and can shoot upwards as high as 80 feet above sea level." It was low tide when we were there, so not super impressive, but not hard to imagine.

Our most interesting story from the marketplace near the blowhole was that we looked for a silver and tanzanite ring and talked the merchant down from $300 to $50. We were so disenchanted by the time he got to $90 that we were halfway down the street. He was chasing us, lowering the price as we went. It was pretty funny, actually. Maybe we should have bought it. Oh well.

We went back to downtown Ensenada and ate lunch in a nice cafe. They had SUPER hot salsa, and I tried Mole for the first time. Put an accent on the end... I did not eat a rodent. It's sort of a cocoa/gravy type sauce they put on chicken. Anyhoo...

The day we got back to L.A. we decided that we couldn't possibly be THAT close to Disneyland and NOT go. So we went. Rob hasn't been for like 15 years, so it was almost like going with a kid. It was lots of fun, and everything was decorated for Christmas. It was the best honeymoon ever.