Leaving home

It was nice this morning to be picked up at 9:30am instead of Deadofnightam as we would have been tomorrow. A much more peaceable way to start a trip. The roads were dry and the day was sunny and, yes, the airport was a zoo, but we expected that during this holiday week. We swung by the USO to make a donation and, as always, left with a couple of snacks for the plane. The volunteers there are the nicest people. We arrived at LGB right on time and took that long 2-minute walk to baggage claim. Our suitcases arrived nearly immediately, and we were at the Crown Plaza by 4pm. 

We would have still been waiting for our luggage if we had flown into LAX. 😉

I should take a minute to talk about our luggage situation for this cruise. We will be changing cabins between each of our cruises, the result of booking them so late, so I was determined to pack as minimally as possible to make our relocations easier. It’s not hard to push a single suitcase from one deck to another while carrying a backpack on my back; add a roll aboard to that and the level of difficulty seems to increase dramatically. So we each brought just our large suitcases with minimal clothing, two extra pairs of shoes and, in my case, a plethora of health- and self-care items and toiletries. Cruising with us and need a foam roller?  I’ve got you covered. Heated eye mask?  Ditto.  A lacrosse ball, red light therapy, 200 individual antibacterial Wet Ones packets, 104 vials of preservative-free eye drops, two packs of makeup remover cloths, eye makeup remover pads, large disposable washcloths (believe it or not, every ship we’ve been on this year has had a washcloth shortage. What’s up with that?)…I could stock a Walgreens with the items in my suitcase. Still, it weighed in at a fairly respectable 39 pounds. 39 pounds, almost eight weeks of cruising.  No shame in that. 

We were able to check in at the Crown Plaza when we arrived, They did have a reservation for us (yay), and we are tucked into a standard king room in excellent condition. We dumped our suitcases in the room and walked around the corner to the Subway we frequent every time we overnight in San Pedro. We managed to get there before sunset, and the walk back after dark was well lit with street lights and the strings of overhead patio lights. We arranged a 9:30am transfer to the ship tomorrow ($10pp, the later shuttles were already full).  It’s nice to fall asleep knowing we are here. 

I’ll leave you with some pics from the plane. The western US is absolutely gorgeous, and we had clear skies all the way to California.  This was the third time we’ve flown this route in the past month, and we never tire of it.

10-night cruise to Mexico on the Emerald Princess

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See that green diamond next to Mazatlan on the map? “Port substitution, port order may vary” means “You’re not going there”. 😆 

The Princess website no longer shows this cruise itinerary, so I snagged this off AI

It wasn’t until two nights before we left that I went in search of the standard map and itinerary that I post for each cruise and realized…we’re not going to Mazatlan!  Who knew?  I’m sure a lot of people did, but I paid no attention to the details of this cruise other than 1) it preceded a cruise we were already booked on; 2) an acceptable cabin was available; and, 3) it was cheap. We booked this on Thanksgiving Day, I think, just before we left for our Royal Princess cruises. I asked G if he wanted to celebrate New Years Eve on a cruise (duh…), booked it, changed air, changed our airport transfer and called it done. The Mazatlan miss really was a surprise to me. No matter.  We’ll return to Loreto and get to La Paz for the first time in a decade. I love the Sea of Cortez. This should be a winner. 

Another holiday surprise:  Christmas morning I received an email from Southwest with a “unique opportunity” for us.  Apparently our flight on December 30 to Long Beach was overbooked, and they were making move over offers for minuscule ($30pp travel credit) compensation. We’ve never gotten an offer like this before. Is it another example of the new Southwest, or just a way to cheap out of bumping passengers?  Or both? At any rate, I was not interested but made the mistake of mentioning it to G, who clearly doesn’t share my aversion to staying in hotels and remembered too well our exciting trip to the airport in November. Before I knew it, we were leaving a day earlier than planned (though at a more humane hour of the morning) and had a room booked at the Crown Plaza hotel in San Pedro. I pre-reserved an Uber using the Uber gift cards I’d just purchased through Costco.com (full credit to maraena on Cruise Critic for the recommendation), re-arranged some social plans and was thankful we still had three days notice. Change is the only constant in our travel life. 

Still, I was reluctant. The Crown Plaza was pricing out at over $350 for one night in a standard room. That’s crazy. Then I found an aggregator called Vio that claimed to have a room available for $184, all in. I could cancel for about 24 hours, so I booked it immediately, waited a couple of hours and phoned the hotel, asking if they had a reservation in our name. They didn’t, and my scam sensor was on high alert. I did an online chat with Vio where I was assured that it simply took a few hours for the hotel to update their reservations. We left it at that for the day.  It was Christmas and we had places to be. 

Early the next morning, I phoned the hotel. Yes they did have a reservation in my name and gave me their internal reservation number. And when I checked my emails, I had received an email from Vio, containing our original chat conversation, and then updating it to state that our reservation had been confirmed with Pauleen at the hotel and giving me the same internal reservation number. I’m all for good deals, but am highly sensitive to scams. This seemed legit, for a nearly 50% discount.

Christmas night we returned home and instead of sitting by the fire contemplating the birth of our Lord and Savior, I was upstairs in the master bath trying to remove the glitter nail polish strips I’ve had on my feet since just before we left for Southampton. Lily and Fox’s Less Bitter, More Glitter and a Seche Vite top coat combo is the bomb. I did the usual acetone soak with tin foil cover for 30 minutes, all the while listening to Luther Vandross’ Christmas album courtesy of friend Fungirl (thank you, loved it), and then spent nearly an hour scraping off the softened polish with an orange stick, simultaneously saying things like “Lord have mercy this is a PITA”, which is kind of prayer-adjacent and so in keeping with the holiday. It was midnight by the time I applied a new set but, with any luck, they’ll last until we return. One less day to get ready?  No prob!

I squeezed in a haircut and a couple of lunches/brunches with friends, and by football time on Sunday (the day, as predicted, turned very cold with light snow) was in my Christmas jammies doing the final load of laundry and watching the games. Our eight full days at home had been a whirlwind of appointments, banking, prescription pick up and pill organizing, phone calls, yard clean up, beautification projects, socializing and celebrating, but we survived the busy-ness and enjoyed being home for the holiday.  Just one more travel day and a hotel night (grrrrr) stand between us and one of our favorite ships (and certainly our most traveled one- nearly 500 days!).

Emerald Princess, we’re coming home!

Let’s do this!

​Happy Christmas, New Year and all around holiday greetings!

I’m actually starting this post the day after Christmas while waiting at the ophthalmologist's office for serum tears to be made (and, right off the bat, trying to spell ophthalmologist correctly has me ready to give up). G has convinced me that I should at least start to blog, but hold off publishing the posts until I’m confident I want to continue. That way if it grows too onerous, I’ll just stop and you’ll never know there was an aborted attempt to resume blogging. So, if you’re reading this, go me!

First, a quick catch up…

November was, as anticipated, busy with cross country championship travel. McGee was an absolute star, and had a breakout season that I was thrilled to witness. However, I was definitely cruise-d and hotel-ed out in the midst of it. In fact, on the flight home from California the weekend after disembarking the Regal Princess in Galveston, I was texting McGee on his flight home and discovered the NCAA Regionals race two weeks later wasn’t going to start until 11:30am (they usually start at 9am) and was also going to take place at a course very close to the airport. I immediately cancelled my hotel reservation and instead flew out and back the same day. (Living in the middle of the country, though pitiful for cruising, works well for most other domestic travel).  When McGee moved up nine places in the final kilometer of the race to finish third, I knew he’d be going to nationals. And he did, held in Missouri the next week, where we watched him and his team run in what was the final cross country race of his career (though there’s still track season to go).  And after it all I was left feeling a lot like I did when McGuy’s final basketball season ended…now what do we do for fun?

Well, go on a cruise to start. G and I left the next weekend to join the Royal Princess in San Pedro for first a 7-night cruise and then a 14-night cruise, both to Mexico. While our entire winter cruising season has been a patchwork of trips pieced together one at a time, that 14-night cruise, originally scheduled to be Princess’s 60th anniversary Love Boat cruise, had been in place for over a year. We didn’t care so much about the anniversary aspect (which is good, because that celebration was dropped)…we just liked the idea of a 14-night Mexico cruise with overnights in two ports, and knew the cross country season would be wrapped up by then. And when I actually had firm dates, we added the 7-night cruise preceding it. 

We hadn’t been to the west coast of Mexico in ten years, and I was ready to return. We had no delusions of doing a lot of sightseeing, but I felt pretty certain we could count on warm days and sun, and, really, that is the whole point of our winter cruising. Staying on the ship on port days is fine if we sprinkle in just a smidge of tourist activities. And that is exactly how those three weeks unfolded. 

I’m not going to recount the details of all of our days, but do want to share a few pics and fun things we did. First, I truly did suspect I might blog on the 14-night cruise. After all, that itinerary was a rarity, and a bit more interesting than the standard 7-night Mexico cruises (understanding, of course, that all these itineraries are interesting, exciting, adventurous the first, second and maybe even fourth time you do them, but after that… Just sayin’, you gotta find your purpose, and ours is no longer to do something blog-worthy in every port). However, I set the Patter on the cabin floor the second day of that cruise to take photo scans of each of its four pages and the app was being difficult (it sometimes is) and I actually had a visceral reaction to it all.  So I set it aside and instead went up to the Lido to watch Sunday NFL games on MUTS and, in the most perfect timing, ran into Deb of the Deb Days blog.  Deb didn’t discourage me from blogging but also didn’t make me feel one bit guilty for NOT blogging.  Then the next day, cruise friend Cheryl texted me, and, she, too, didn’t discourage me from blogging but definitely didn’t make me feel one bit guilty for not blogging.  So you got blog bupkus. 😉

But, in hindsight, we had a fantastic 21 nights on the Royal Princess.  First, we flew out the day of the cruise (oh just stop!), because…well, I was hotel-ed out, remember?  But we flew into Long Beach (LGB) on a very early direct flight so I assumed we’d have plenty of time. And it did all work out in the end, but getting there was exciting. We woke to our first snow of the season, the kind that is icy and blinding in the dark of night, severely hampering travel even before it starts to accumulate into the several inch category.  Factor in some engine trouble (we used a car service) with dashboard warning lights and forced vehicle slowing, slowing, slowing as a result and I was pretty certain in that moment that we were going to be missing our first cruise and THIS was the reason we should have arrived a day early. It was a very bad situation turned miracle, as our vehicle limped to an airport hotel that had a shuttle leaving in (literally) two minutes. We got to our gate just before boarding started, were delayed an hour when we had to de-ice, and still arrived at the ship by 11am. See, it’s a good story, and so wasn’t worth stressing about (haha). And we have yet another reason to love LGB as an arrival airport for cruises out of Los Angeles.   

And after that, it was all good. Well, it was mostly excellent with just a couple of negatives. We loved the Royal Princess, the crew that we interacted with was just fantastic (they treated us like family), the food was as decent as it gets these days though the buffet food was not hot at all, the entertainment, though not always to our taste, was good, and we especially loved the mariachi group, the Diamond Trio, who really were the rock stars of the cruise. 

For the first cruise, we paid to upgrade to a specific balcony cabin that became available after re-thinking the inside cabin we had initially booked (fairly last minute, there wasn’t much choice), as it was located more forward than the bridge and was a long way from the Horizon Terrace we enjoy so much. For the second cruise we were in M525 which I had booked over a year ago, thinking it would be perfect.  The cabin itself was perfect (ample storage) but it was located right under the pastry shop area in the buffet, and every night from 10pm to 11pm or so and again from 5am to 6am they were apparently juggling metal food pans. Unfortunately, they weren’t very good at it, and dropped them.  A lot. And then they must have been frustrated by their lack of skill and kicked them across the floor, where they clashed into each other. We are highly tolerant of noise from above, and have long heard carts rolling and chairs being dragged, as we love Marina Deck (and Riviera Deck and Aloha Deck, depending on the ship) cabins, but this was a bit too much. ATWEP (always travel with ear plugs)!

We didn’t always get off the ship in ports, but generally did, if only to walk around a little. Still, we definitely had some cruise highlights, including a pulmonia ride each time we were in Mazatlan.  One time we went to the Golden Zone, where we were invited to sit on a covered wooden deck overlooking the beach while we dined on the best fish tacos I’ve ever had and enjoyed the parasailing and sail boating taking place just offshore  

The Cathedral Basilica of the Immaculate Conception 

Sunset in Puerto Vallarta 

I had forgotten how beautiful Loreto on the Sea of Cortez, is. Though we spent our day there simply walking along the waterfront, the real attraction was our sail away at sunset.

For our Cabo San Lucas overnight, we booked a trimaran sunset sail through Viator. It was simply perfect. The scenery, the whales, the chips, salsa and guacamole and there may have been a little liquid joy consumed, too.  We’d love to do a repeat.

The next night we didn’t sail from Cabo until nearly 9pm (we could have done the sunset sail either night), and watched another beautiful sunset from Deck 18 on the Royal Princess.

El Arco taken after dark using the iPhone 15 Pro LiDAR technology with the camera app. 

Snowfall during caroling in the Piazza

 The Diamond Trio leading us in Feliz Navidad

Our weather was not too hot, not too humid and always, always sunny. It really could not have been a more perfect cruise experience. Luckily, we returned home December 20 to amazing weather of our own, record high temps, definitely not a white Christmas, though the snow is supposed to find us (again) just before we leave. Next up: 52 days of cruising on the Emerald Princess. It’s not exactly like the pre-COVID days, but it’s definitely trending that direction. 

Life is good. :-)