Cruise To Mexico (Part 3 of 3)

Finally, part 3 of my Cruise to Mexico. ahh, at last ~ I am happy to be finally done with editing my Mexico photos.

Just a quick update… I will be having another giveaway coming soon. Most likely, the giveaway will be posted up sometime this weekend.

Ok, let’s get started already!!!

 

 Day 6: Cabo San Lucas, Mexico

This morning we ordered breakfast in bed. Everything seemed to all happen in a rush, but in the end, everything turned out fine. At Cabo, our ship could not dock since the water was too shallow, so we tendered to and from the ship. Below is a photo of our ship’s tender (a small boat), and also some photos of the view while being tendered!

We decided to do the same thing that we did at our previous destination, sign up for a shore excursion on land as opposed to on our ship. This time we wanted to try snorkeling!! I’ve actually never snorkeled before, so I was quite excited. I think we also paid a fraction of the cost! We saved about 75% by purchasing on land.

To start off our new mini adventure.. we were taken in a private boat to go on a tour of Land’s End. Here we are heading back out of the docking area.

We made our way towards those beautiful rocks that you saw in the very first photo 

This is Lover’s Beach, a nice secluded beach that is only accessible by boat. How romantic?

Being so close to these rock formations really awe struck me. Not as awe striking as it is the first time you over look the Grand Canyon, but something similar to it. I felt so small looking at these rocks and it made me wonder how they came to be.

Here we are at El Arco, also known as The Arch. Haha, creative huh? So cool though!

The ocean waters around this area had lots of sea lions as well! They were swimming in the waters around us, I wish I could have snorkeled with them! I heard that they are super friendly too~

Our tour guide and boat driver was kind enough to offer to take a photo for us. Kind or did he want a tip? Lol.. it’s odd because I feel like a lot of the locals expect tip from us, even when they didn’t do anything for us!

So after our tour, we had the option of getting dropped off at either Lover’s Beach or Pelican Rock to go snorkeling. We decided that we wanted to go to Pelican Rock for snorkeling since our driver said that it was better. What’s nice is that you can choose however long you want to stay at the snorkeling spot for, before getting picked up by a boat.

Pelican Beach is perfect for snorkeling because the area is roped off so that boats can not enter the area. Also, there are large rock columns that have lots of reef life on it. Well, not as much as we would have imagined, but still some.

The beach was great for the most part. I remember smudging the sand all over my body. The sand was so silky smooth, perfect for exfoliating, lol.

When I first got into the water… I assumed that there wouldn’t be that many fish. With your head above the water, it is difficult to see how many fish are underneath. My first thought was that there would be only 5 fish. To my surprise, there was a whole world of fish!!

I got scared at one point because someone gave us food to feed the fish with. I had a handful in my left hand, so when I put my hand in the water, all the fish knew what I had and would start to swarm me!

I kept feeling painful stings on different parts of my body a couple of times every minute. My first assumption was that the fish were nipping at me. I then thought about it more for other conclusions. Then I thought, “Jellyfish!” I looked around and sure enough I saw tiny little _______ . Not sure what, but I’m assuming that they were little jellyfish.  Some locals told me that they were “water bugs,” but that didn’t seem right to me. I looked it up online and there are lots of reports on people getting stung by jelly fish in Cabo. It all makes sense now.

Here’s a bunch of random photos of us holding things found in the ocean such as starfish, sea urchin, and puffer fish!! OMG, yes a puffer fish! haha~ >_<*

Lol, Erick got mad at me because while he was holding the puffer fish, I decided to grab his arm for one of the photo shots and accidentally pushed his hand into the spikes ~ oops.

By now I got pretty used to snorkeling. The only thing I wish is that I could go deeper into the ocean. I kept going a little bit too deep and getting liquid into my snorkel tube. Bleh ~ I hate getting water in my mouth. It sucks! I guess this is where scuba diving certification comes in. I think we are going to get one sometime in 2013… Then I can explore deeper down under…

Alright now back to land and enough time pretending to be Ariel. Our driver has come right on time to pick us up. We quickly pay off the guy who we hired to take photos of us underwater and make our way to the boat. We were starving by the time we arrived back at the loading dock.  While in search of food, we end up shopping…

I didn’t buy too much except for some presents for friends and family. I got a cup, some shot glasses, three wraps (pink, purple, lavender), and a moraca. Nice little gifts 🙂 Honestly most of the stuff there could be bought anywhere, and depending on what you were trying to buy, the prices weren’t that much cheaper.

While wondering around for a good place to eat, we eventually settled at a taco truck. It was a little bit away from the tourist area, and looked kind of shady. I ordered some Corona and got it in a red plastic cup. Haha, it felt dirty and kind of warm. Oh but the food was good, nothing amazing, just good. Extra points for them because they had a lot of different hot sauces.

Before heading back to the cruise ship, we decided to take a tourist photo. I think it came out good? This would probably be the cover photo of a Cruise to Mexico photo album if I had one.

Back on the ship we washed up and cared to our wounds. By now, we were covered with bug bites from our previous spot, and now we had new sting marks from the jellyfish.  The sting marks from the jellyfish look like a line of dots. I swear I looked like one of Yayoi Kusama’s art works.

Now our favorite time of the day, meal time! This is our last formal dinner. We looked good this night.

All the food pictured below was what I ordered for dinner. Erick had basically the same thing as me, so I didn’t bother to photograph his food. My favorite has to be the escargots. They were so good and covered in delicious hot melted butter!

In the elevator after dinner we did some camera whoring. We were so full and tired, but we still managing to stay standing some how.

We ended up going to a karaoke event at our favorite spot. Some people got really into singing while others started dancing. It was a great second to last night. Everyone made the most of it.

 

 Day 7: Heading Home

Since today was the last full day on the ship, we decided to plan out our day. We woke up earlier to eat breakfast. This is what I ate, good ole guacamole and sour cream.

After breakfast we managed to squeeze in a couple minutes of ping pong before going up to take a Disco dance class. We headed down after to get some lunch and then took a Swing dance class afterwards. So much dancing!! But it was worth it.. it would be even more worth it if we still remembered anything that we learned, lol. Too bad we don’t (but maybe if I actually tried).

Here we are now at mixology class. They taught us how to make three different drinks.

The only thing is that not everyone gests to mix drinks. Only about 6 different people each class get to play bartender. Two for the first drink, another two make the second drink, and so on. So Erick ended up being one of the six participants. I was worried how his drink would come out, but it turned out good!

The three drinks that were made.. Sparkling Bellini Manhattan, Coral Drop, and Cosmo Cubana. All of them were quite good, and pretty don’t you think?

While waiting to eat dinner, we listed to a group of female string instrument musicians. They were quite good, but the room was also quite empty. Haha, and we had a pager that was waiting to explode with noise once our dinner table was ready. We felt like sitting time bombs so we decided to ditch the music room.

Good thing we got up because not long after did our pager go off. It has the most annoying ring to it because it talks repeatedly, louder and louder.. “your table is now ready… please proceed to the…”

More food snippets from dinner. I hated this dinner the most, way to end of the cruise with a horrible dinner. I think I just ordered all the wrong dishes however, because I misinterpreted every dishes description on the menu.

At the end of the night, there was a Variety Show  that I had been looking forward to. To my disappointment, the performers were the same two that participated in shows one of the other 7 nights. I was kind of hoping for something else. The comedian was good as usual and the ventriloquist was a tiny bit lame.

 

 Day 8: San Diego, California

Saturday morning we woke up docked in SanDiego. We are offically back! For our last meal, we made sure to scurry on up to the buffet for some last minute breakfast before we had to head out. That was a nice feeling, to end our trip where we began.. back at the buffet, lol.

Alright, now for some random fun. There were two guys who were in charge of our hall, they knew us by name and were super friendly. They greeted us every time they saw us and also cleaned our rooms. Over the course of the vacation, they left a series of towel animals. It was fun because it would be a surprise waiting for us every time we returned to our room. At first we thought it was lame since the complexity of it was simple (see sting ray).. But they kept getting crazier and crazier! Lol, we tried to make one of our own to leave for them when they came in to clean our room.. But ours was such a fail (no photo available).

We got certificates for taking so many dance classes throughout the cruise. Yay! I snapped a photo of the certificates and trashed them afterwards.

 

And this concludes my final post on my Cruise to Mexico! Thanks so much for following me along on my journey. I hope you truly enjoyed all of the photos and stories that I had to share.

If you missed out on the other Cruise to Mexico posts, you can read Part 1 here and Part 2 here.

See you again in a couple of days!

 Sarah