Mexico watch out here we come!

This was such a great trip! I had never been on a cruise before and neither had Kody.The first thing we did when we got on board was eat and that set the whole tone of our trip! There were endless supplies of food the whole time. Anytime and anywhere you wanted to eat you could. They were always more then happy to get you anything.

Our first port of call was San Diego California! It was beautiful weather. We got off the ship and just kind of wandered around. We went shopping and although we didn't get anything we had a lot of fun.

Oh and the necklaces around our necks in this picture are not sporting our new lack of style, but they were to tell them we were from the cruise and could get on the bus and then back again. You never thought a necklace would be so important did you. . . well me neither. But then again I never thought I would ever see Kody wearing one either! Smile!!

The ship was huge! We were still finding places we had never been the very last day of our trip. That is no joke! It's name was the Monarch of the Sea. Great name huh?! The size of it overwhelmed me everytime we saw it when we got on or off. But I guess the bigger it is the harder it is to sink!

This picture is when we were pulling out from San Diego! It was neat to sit on the sides of the boat when we were backing up and watch all of the other boats moving out of our way. Actually it was really neat to just watch the water swirling behind you. As we were backing out of here we realized that the captain of the ship was right below us. You can kind of see him behind Kody. We watched as he fiddled with all of his tools. You could also really feel the breeze as you moved. We made it a habit of watching when we left ports.

After having some fun on land we decided to explore the ship we were on.

One of the things that they had was a rock climbing wall. Kody pointed out that we were on a ship that was massive, with a climbing wall, and then how many feet of water?! Putting us way above land!!! And then it wasn't even dry land. But that made it all the more adventuresome so we went for it. Both of us reached the top.

They had so many things that you could do on the boat! This was only one but this was probably my favorite. We also went swimming, to a couple of shows, and. . . ofcourse Kody played basketball.


We would come back to our room after being out all day and the maids would always leave us little animals made out of our towels. It just added the special touch to have the sunglasses!

Don't worry, we are not standing in the ocean! Now that we have that cleared up, I will tell you about Catolina Island. This was the second place that we stopped at. It was so pretty as we were coming in. This time the boat didn't port, we just stopped out in the ocean and a smaller boat came out to get us. We are on that boat in this picture.

We wandered around alittle and then thought it would be fun to go snorkling. It was a blast! The water was freezing (ask Kody, he will tell you that is an understatement!), but don't we just look so cute in our gear? They fed the fish here to keep them there for the glass bottom boats so we saw some pretty cool fish but then decided to get out before we got hypothermia. You can see the cruise ship behind us in this picture.

Someone gave us some bread to feed the fish. Kody was holding it in his hand and then it was gone. He couldn't believe it. The fish had jumped up and grabbed the whole sack out of his hand. It was pretty funny! After we were done, we headed into the little town. It was so cute! We ate at a resturant there and the food was fabulous.

We rented a bike to see things around town. It was probably one of our favorite things we did on this island. It only took Kody a minute to get use to pedeling for the two of us. Just kidding! We had a great time figuring out the bike it made it more of an adventure.

We were exhausted by the end of the day but we had alot of fun here!






Another fun little surprise when we returned!

This night they throw a great big chocolate party! And boy was it a party. There was more choclate then I had seen in a long time, and it was really good.

This is one of the many creations, and Kody's favorite! I bet you can't guess why?! We loved walking through and looking at all of the things they had made. There was food galor.

Yum! Yum! We both wanted to eat more by the time we got done but we just couldn't. You can see all of the things we had on our plates. Not only that but they had the party at like 11:00 at night. We sure liked what we did have though and took some back with us to eat the next day.

In Mexico we decided to go to a place called the Blow Hole! So, we snatched a taxi and rode for
about an hour. We came to a street lined with tons of shops and a weird looking horse that was painted like a zebra. There were people trying to sell us things all the way down the street.

The street was filled with people running out trying to sell us everything in sight. We ended up with a belt and sandals.

Here is the blow hole. It was pretty cool to see the water come up through a hole in the rock and spray everywhere. We couldn't seem to time it just right to get us in the picture with the water, but there is the water and a bunch of random people.

We had to try some food down there so we ordered a fish taco in downtown Ensenada. Turned out to be really good. It was funny because we only ordered 2 for $1 and they sat us down, gave us chips, salsa and a waiter. All for $1!! We picked up a shirt and hat as well in the shops there.

One quick story, on our way back to Ensenada in the taxi we came up to this big line of cars at a stop light. Our driver got in the left turn lane and drove up past probably 20 cars to get to the light. We couldn't figure out what he was doing because we knew we weren't supposed to turn there. All of a sudden our driver hit the gas just before the light turned green and cut off the car next to us in order to get into the through lane!!! I said, "Looks like you have a couple of tricks up your sleave!" By then the driver behind us came up next to us had a few choice words to say gave us a hand signal and took off. Our driver just looked over waved and smiled. It was hilarious! Haven't tried that in the States but it works in Mexico.

The picture below was our dinner attendant. He was so funny. One night he forgot to bring us our desserts and when he found out that he had forgotten we became his most honored guests. About every couple of minutes he would come around to see if everything was alright and then apologize profoundly for forgetting. We were fine with it though, it gave more time for the huge dinner to settle so we could eat a huge dessert!

Like I said our ships name was Monarch of the Seas. Sounds like nothing could ever happen to it huh?! Just don't forget the Titanic! Just kidding. Actually we had to do all kinds of drills the first day to make sure we could get in lifeboats and all. The whole time we never really thought we were on a ship (even though we knew we were). We never had any rocking until the last day on the way back to Long Beach. That is when we literally started "crusin". On that last night we walked around the outside of the boat and watched the water. It was peaceful and beautiful, but we could sure tell the boat was moving. When we got back to Long Beach we were half glad to get home and half sad that our trip was over. Lots of memories and lots of fun!