Our Non-Mexican Cruise
Our cruise was the Holland America Sea of Cortez cruise, 10 nights with 6 ports leaving on Friday April 24. Susan flew to Ontario on Tuesday and rented a car to go visit her mother near Palm Springs. I flew to San Diego on Wednesday where Susan met me with the rental car. We stayed at the Embassy Suites downtown which is 1 block from Seaport Village. Wednesday after checking in we walked around the waterfront and after taking advantage of the free Happy hour at the hotel had a nice dinner in a seafood restaurant nearby. Thursday we played golf at Cottonwood which was an okay course, lots of water. I had paid online so it was $25 each which included 18 holes, cart and the guy threw in free rental clubs as the rental clubs were not that good, looks like ones they had collected that people had lost on the course and they were beat up besides, but we still had a great time. After the 18 holes we had dinner in a nearby Irish restaurant, Susan had fish and chips, I had a beef stew. Once we got back to the hotel we walked down to the gaslight district where I found an ice cream store for desert.
The next morning after breakfast we went to the San Diego zoo, got there when the opened at 9 am and as we had purchased our tickets at the Visitors Center the day before, we didn't have to stop at the ticket booth but walked right in. BTW we saved $2 each by purchasing the tickets at the Visitors Center instead of online even. The zoo was nice, we took the bus tour and then walked around. We left about 1 PM as it was getting crowded and we needed to get to the ship. We drive the rental car to the pier and dropped off the luggage, took all of 3 minutes, interesting that to drive on the pier, no one checked our ID or even our tickets, the guy at luggage saw the tags on the luggage and took them. We then returned the rental car, Avis has an office about 3 blocks away but even if we turned it in at the airport, it would be less than a mile. We walked the three blocks to the ship and had to show ID and tickets to walk onto the pier. Check in was quick, maybe 15people in line and about 10 agents so we waited less than 5 minutes. Once we got onboard since it was now about 2:30 PM our stateroom was ready. We didn't wait long for the suitcases, 3 came before the lifeboat drill, the other one immediately afterwards.
Nice, quiet particularly for location on shipo.