The day before we were supposed to leave for our cruise, Paul decides to play racquetball with his cousin Seth. Sometime after 9:00 A.M. I find a message on my phone from Paul telling me that he had gotten hit right in the eyeball and couldn't see much out of his eye. Of course I started to flip out a little bit. Here we are leaving the country in less than 24 hours and Paul is partially blind in one eye. He told me that he was going to just wait and see if it got better by the time I got back from work. I quickly got permission to leave and take him to the eye doctor.
The doctor prescribed some eye drops and told him it was a bad idea to leave the country. He then sent us to an eye surgeon in Salt Lake. Once we got to Salt Lake the eye surgeon told us that since Paul's retina did not detach he would be ok if we went on our cruise so long as Paul took it easy, put in his eye drops every day, and slept inclined.
We got to the port in California and we were so excited. After lots of long hours waiting in lines and checkin in bags we finally got onto the ship. The Carnival Spirit was our lovely home for the next few days, and man was it massive! I had never seen a cruise ship up close and personal, and was quite surprised at how massive it really was!
Day one mostly involved eating, exploring, resting and more eating. Did I mention we did a lot of eating? The food was so delicious! And you could always find it somewhere on the boat. Our second day was a day at sea. We filled our time with, playing games, loafing around, and what do you know, more food! Our third day we arrived at Cabo San Lucas Mexico. Where we toured the city a little bit. Amanda, my sister in law, found a glass blowing factory so we went and checked that out.
We got to watch how they made the blown glass. It was really neat. They would throw old glass bottles into a really hot kiln type thing, melt it down into goopy hot red glass, scoop it up on a long metal pipe then start to blow and shape the glass as it cooled.
The people running the shop even let us have a go at blowing the glass. I thought it would be easy like blowing up a regular sized balloon, but no, it was harder then blowing up a water balloon!
After our trip to the glass blowing factory, we walked the shops, found a fun restaurant to eat lunch at, and walked around for several miles trying to find a way to get to the beach. Sadly it was getting dark and we couldn't find a walkable path to the beach so we decided that we would go the next day. On day four we spent almost the whole day at Cabo San Lucas again. We hassled and bargained with a local to take us in his water taxi out to the beach. Good thing Paul has good bargaining skills. He got us a good deal! At the beach we went snorkeling, explored a small cave, and just looked at all of the beautiful sights.
Day five we were in Baja Mexico. Just South of California but still in Mexico. Here we went on an excursion to La Bufadora, that means The Blow hole. Paul and I went to a similar place while we were in Kauai called The Spouting Horn, and then we got to visit this one in Mexico. It is said that there are only three of these blow holes in the world. Paul and I have now been to two of them. The last one is in Australia, so I guess we will try to go to Australia some day to have visited all three!
We flew into SLC the day before Christmas Eve, ready to relax a little bit and celebrate with our families, but on the way home from the airport we we the lucky recipientes of a couch flying out of a truck onto the freeway. Merry Christmas to the parents in law! They totaled their car! Wahoo! So a couch flew out of a trailer in the middle of the freeway, we switched lanes to pass a truck slowing down and he tried to switch into the lane we were in while slamming on his breaks so we had no choice but to slam on our breaks and hope that we didn't hit them too hard.
Thankfully no one got hurt, but the car was a little worse for wear. Paul's dad ended up with a totaled vehicle and had to geta new one, but we tried not to think about that too much over the christmas Holiday.
The rest of our break was pretty uneventful. We had Christmas Eve with both families, as well as Christmas. We spent most of our New Years Eve with Paul's family playing games and having a blast. But alas Break time is over. Time to go back to work!
