Cruisin’-Day 3

 

Technically, the first part of this post happened on the night of Day 2 but whatever. Although I didn’t mention it before, we heard about the cruise through our volunteer work with the Relay For Life. As we discovered, this cruise was organized by a Relay family team from Oregon who run a travel agency. They felt this cruise would be a fantastic way for them to earn some serious donations as well as offer a fantastic vacation for us hard-working volunteers and, more importantly, survivors.

 

 

During the pre-cruise party, we met some of the other Relayers joining us on the cruise, received our itinerary and had some snacks. Sherri (in the blue Relay shirt) was our fearless leader and organizer of this event.

     

The next morning was the big day as we were welcomed aboard the Sapphire Princess :)

We couldn’t help ourselves LOL!

After a quick look around, we headed to our staterooms to dump our luggage…

…then met up with our group for the safety meeting.

Safety first :)

 

Thus began Elizabeth’s love affair with every pool on the ship and our grand tour of all things edible.  But fear not, we all lost weight on the cruise due to the insane amount of walking (and swimming)!

 

 

**Please note the brilliant color of her swimsuit above.  This will be important in six more posts.

After the safety meeting and pointed towards San Francisco, the pool party kicked off. Lots of line dancing, drinks and people watching after which we took a little tour of the dining room as well as a few other places before calling it a night.

 

 

San Francisco, here we come!

Cruisin’-Day 2

Long Beach: Day 2 found us at Redondo Beach and Huntington Beach. Elizabeth loved it! She was so excited about finding tiny sea shells, the washed up seaweed pods and building sand castles!

 

  

 

 

  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

We then took a drive along the coast until we made it to Seal Beach; a recommended fun spot with beach front shopping and restaurants.

   

     

  

After some souvenir shopping and some delicious food, we moved on to Huntington Beach. I cannot talk about going to Huntington Beach without mentioning that there was a security gate where we had to pay…wait for it…$10 to get in…to the beach…WHAT??? I think he probably knew we were tourists.

We had a lot of fun seeing the coastal plants and flowers, watched some sea birds follow the surf in and out (they were hilarious but I can’t find my video) and got buzzed by a couple of pelicans. All in all, the tour of beaches was a lot of fun!

Cruisin’-Day 1

I’m just going to pretend that I’ve been SO busy having a life that I haven’t had a chance to blog since January.  Well, some of that’s true.  We are usually busy but it’s not always that exciting.  However, I’m not here to talk about the boring stuff like dishes, laundry and taxiing my daughter around!

As I mentioned several months ago, we went on a cruise along the California coast last October. This was our first official family vacation but hopefully not our last.  Because we were gone for nine days, my plan is to highlight each day our trip and although technically the cruise was only seven days, we arrived in Long Beach a couple days early to check out the sites.

  This was Elizabeth’s first time flying. She was very excited!

 

After we arrived in Long Beach and settled in at our motel, Elizabeth and Steve decided  it was time for a swim.  Little did we know, that’s all they’d be doing for the next nine days :)

Once dry, we packed up our rental car and headed to Medieval Times…

  …where we watched a fantastic show…

 

… ate delicious food with our fingers…

… and Elizabeth fell in love with the Red Knight after being crowned Queen of the Tournament :)

 

Although this was our first “knight” in California, we could have left feeling like the trip was a success. Medieval Times was awesome, the actors were hilarious and it was well worth the near-death driving experience we encountered just to get there :)