Monday, 14 February 2005

Happy Valentine's Day from Cabo San Lucas!

This was the view from our veranda this morning after breakfast. We arrived at Cabo San Lucas around dawn. Yesterday we watched a spectacular sunrise from our veranda, so last night we invited the moms up to watch today's sunrise. But just minutes before dawn, the ship turned east, so the actual sunrise happened over the bow of the ship.

Here was what dawn had looked like the day before, though.

After breakfast, I went for a run on the Promenade deck. It's three laps to the mile; I did 5 laps. Once I'd showered and dressed, we all went to catch a tender and headed out to Cabo San Lucas.

Friday, Saturday, and Sunday had all been colder than we'd really hoped for, given that we'd come south to get away from the winter; the highs in San Diego were in the low 60s, and it remained cool yesterday as we sailed south. Today, though, we entered the tropics and got our warm weather.

It was nice to get to do some walking where you actually go someplace, rather than just around in circles. I remembered to wear my sunblock and to bring my hat, so I think I avoided getting burned.

Lots of people at the port selling tours, boat rides, taxes, jewelry, etc. I'm not in my element when dealing with people trying to sell me things. Not that I end up buying things; I just can't get past feeling like it's rude not to stop and talk to people. I try to tell myself that they'd just as soon I moved along, if I'm not going to buy anything, so they can try to sell to the next guy, but I'm not sure that's true. They're people, too. Maybe they're pleased to interact with people, even those who aren't buying.

We didn't really have a plan for our visit, just a vague intention to see some art galleries and a museum or two. We did visit a sort of an art gallery. It was called "Zen Mar" and featured masks. They must have had a thousand masks, plus some day-of-the-dead sculptures, some nice lacquered boxes, as well as some t-shirts and other cheap tourist stuff. It was the masks that were striking, though. Many were grotesque. I rather liked one with worms crawling out of the face, and thought about buying Steve's wife one with spiders crawling across it. Jackie liked one of a jaguar with some petaled flower motif.

The museum we wanted to go to turned out to be closed. There was another museum that we headed towards, but in making our lunch plans found that we all felt like heading back to the ship and having the wonderful lunch that would be available on board, rather than the unknown quantity of whatever lunch we'd have ended up with in Cabo San Lucas. So, that's what we did.

Before boarding the tender to head back to the ship, we stopped at an arts and crafts mall near the dock and Jackie and I bought two wool serapes, mine grey-and-white stripped, Jackie's just grey. I've been thinking about getting such a thing for a few months now, so this seemed like a good chance.

This is me, dressed for formal night, which was last night. Jackie looked spectacular; I just looked like a guy in a suit.

The first night we were here we went to the show, which featured dancers and a comedian who had a pretty good cruse-ship routine. He did a hilarious impersonation of Arnold Schwartsenegger singing "Close to You" (with some poor woman selected from the audience to be sung to). Tonight we're going to skip the show and instead go to the piano bar.

I don't think I'll get this posted tonight. I'll try to do it tomorrow morning, using some the incredibly expensive internet minutes I bought.

I haven't gotten any writing done, so far, but I kind of feel like writing, so I may do some. We've been busy nearly every minute, but there's almost nothing that we have to do, so I can write if I feel like. The next two days we'll be in port (Mazatl‡n tomorrow, Puerto Vallarta the next day), but I think I'll get some writing anyway.

The piano bar was great! The piano player (a guy named Larry) was doing a Billy Joel tribute, and did about an hour of Billy Joel tunes, after which he switched to doing stuff he liked and stuff people asked for. He's an excellent piano player with a vast knowledge of popular tunes, but not the sort of comprehensive knowledge of song lyrics that I'd want to have if that were my job. So the results were hilarious. Somebody asked for "Great Balls of Fire." Larry said, "What's the first line?" Once he had the first line, he played the lead-in perfectly, sang the first line, then sort of mumbled his way through the first verse, then bellowed out "Great Balls of Fire." He did much the same for another dozen songs people wanted to hear, which he remembered with varying degrees of accuracy. You'd have thought a guy taking requests in a piano bar when he couldn't remember the words to songs any better than Larry would be lame, but in fact he turned it into a great show. We stayed until midnight and may go back tomorrow.