The Cruise 2009

Our spur of the moment cruise was fantastic! The drive was long, but once we got there it was well worth it. The first night is pretty uneventful. You get there in time to unpack, settle in and go to dinner. The first show was not that great and I'm pretty sure I slept through part of it. The second day we slept until 9 or so then headed out for Catalina Island. We wanted to "do" more than we have in the past, so we rented mountain bikes and rode around the island. We did do one little running jaunt, but it was only about a mile, so not much to speak of. We didn't eat any crap while we were there and still had a grand time. Between the sweat and the humidity, my hair was a total fuzzball so I bought a ball cap. It was worth every penny!


Glade had an ice cream cone with every meal and sometimes in between. This was at breakfast.

If you look close, it says "Whittley Ave."

This was after we rode out to the far beach. We were trying out the timer setting on the camera so we could both be in the pictures. This was before I bought the hat!

We took this up by the Wrigley Mansion. This is the first spring training field for the Chicago Cubs. I'm pretty sure our little league fields are bigger than this. Amazing. I'm just going to mention that safety comes before fashion. Helmet....not my best look!

This is me thinking I might die. We were trying to stay on the medium trails around the island. I thought they were plenty challenging. On a "navigational error", we ended up on the hardest route and ended up on top of the mountain. I had to stop about every 50 feet and take a break. I think it took us about half an hour to get up and about a minute and a half to get back down. We tried to take a picture to show how high up we rode.

We started down where all those people are, right next to the water. We were high!

This was formal night in the Mikado lounge waiting for the show to start. We had already seen both the "dancing' shows on our last cruise, but one night they had Bobby Borgia doing magic and it was awesome! We found out that we had open dining, which means you can go eat whenever you want. We determined which shows we went to by how tired we were that day and how early we planned on turning in.

For all but one of the days, we were in a heavy cloud of vapor. Nothing but wet air. Seriously bad on the hair! I sported the cap again even though it did NOT go well with my outfit..lol! We tried out the mini put and of course, I won. That morning, we went to the gym for awhile, then played Battle of the Sexes, watched the hairy chest competition, played some Euchre and chilled in the room for awhile. The whole day has scheduled activities, so you choose which ones you want to participate in.

I'm pretty sure this was the same day. I think I wore two outfits a day, not including work out clothes. Why? Because I could! I forgot, Glade did a free throw contest. He didn't win, but he did pretty well.

This is part of the reason I gained 2.5 pounds. It's a swan made from cream puff dough and ice cream. Cute! I also ate chocolate melting cake for dessert every night but one. I had a big piece of regular cake that night! Chocolate melting cake is a little cupcake like dish with chocolate cake half cooked served with ice cream on the side. Very yummy!

Every cruise, they have a walk for Breast Cancer. The minimum donation is $10 per person. You get a wrist band and a t-shirt and then everyone meets up on the track and walks a mile. We decide to get our work out in early, before the event started. We went 4 miles that morning. It was a lot of sporadic running and walking because the track is small and people started showing up. While waiting to get off the ship, a little elderly woman saw me and says "Oh! Hi!" and waves at me. I said hello and then my face must have said "Do I know you?" because she then said "you were running....up there!" I just smiled and said "yeah".

The second day, we did more chilling. We did the walk, did line dancing, watched ice sculpting, played Name that Tune and did a scavenger hunt. The line dancing is fun, one of the ship's dancers teaches it. We met some older couples who danced behind us and then hung out with them during Name that Tune as well. There were several members of the Church on the cruise. We didn't win the scavenger hunt either. They gave you a list and 20 minutes to find it all. People were very helpful and were mostly happy to "loan" you what you needed. The girl I got the pink flip flop from was not that gracious. She let me have it, but not so happily. The kicker was that you got one point for every bikini top you collected. You could NOT take one from someone wearing it. I left all my bikinis at home (cough cough) so we were fresh out of luck with that one. The girl whose tattoo we were using took the picture of us holding all the stuff. Glade put lipstick on for another point, what a team player!

This is what you do when you are just hanging out by the pool, yes, in long pants. Most days I was freezing, but on this one, the sun came out...go figure. I was taking pictures of whatever. These are my toes.

We asked a gentleman to take a picture of us, so he went a long ways away and took one sort of of us. We could tell the focus was really high. I cropped this so we were actually the picture. After he took it, he asked if I wanted him to go way up on the balcony and take one looking down. That was the only time I worried about my camera!

Us NOT winning a 24k solid plastic, ship on a stick. Our scavenger hunt goodies. I asked one of the waitresses for an empty, used, plastic "carnival" cup. She looked confused and asked "Are you lost?" I gave up on that one, but she came through for us a few minutes later.

Yeeeehawww! Line dancing to Shania.

This isn't the only dancing we did. We decided to experience the night life on the boat. We were usually too tired to stay up that late, but decided to the last night. We went to the "R&B club room and it was empty. That was actually good for us, cuz we got our groove on without any pointing and laughing. Eventually some other goofy youngsters who couldn't dance came and joined us. It was fun to let loose and dance like we did oh-so-many years ago....even if we didn't look the same! We were still in bed by 11:30.

We had different dinner guests every night and that was interesting. Most were very nice, we even sat with a gentleman from Chandler. Twice we ran into different people from Chandler. One guy used to be from Mesa and now lives in Utah. There truly are people of all kinds in this world and you can experience them all on a cruise! We had a very relaxing few days and I would highly recommend it!

A super special thanks to all those who helped with my babies and carpooling. Thanks Jenny, Shelli, Julia and Denise! Of course, my mom deserves more credit than I could even begin to give. What would I do without her???? (probably not go on vacations!) Love you mom!