Mexico Cruise Day 0 - San Diego

Last year at Christmas, we got this hair-brained idea that for Christmas 2009, our family should all take a cruise together instead of having our usual gathering in San Gabriel. Over the first few weeks of January, plans were made and we decided to go for it. We booked 4 staterooms on Holland America's Oosterdam for a 7 day Mexican Riviera cruise departing on December 19th from San Diego. The four of us went (2 cabins) along with my brother John and his family (wife Kitty and daughter Sami) and my parents.

Since this was to be in lieu of exchanging gifts, we thought this would mean no Christmas shopping. However, we ended up having to do quite a bit of clothes shopping since I haven't had a suit that fits since our last cruise (11 years ago!) and the boyz needed suits. Rachel had quite a few dresses that still fit her, but she needed shoes and a few other things. We managed to get all this done and were finally ready to pack.

The plan was to fly into San Diego on Friday the 18th, so we were going to get all packed up on Thursday. I went to work that day and Rachel started the packing. All was going well until the bedroom carpet got flooded with about 15 gallons of water from the aquarium - not good! Rachel borrowed a carpet cleaning machine to suck up as much water as she could, and we broke down the bed and moved everything out of that side of the room, ripped up the carpet, cut out the part of the padding that had become soaked and brought in a fan to try and dry things out. We did eventually get packed, but we had to sleep on couches that night. Fortunately our friend Phil has done carpet stretching, and agreed to come over while we were gone (after the carpet was dry) and fix it.

We were all up and out the next morning on the way to the airport. Unlike last year (18 inches of snow!), it was a sunny but cool day and we had no trouble at all getting to the airport. Our flight was pretty much on time, and we arrived in San Diego early in the afternoon. We took a shuttle to our hotel (Holiday Inn on the Bay) and checked into our room on the 7th floor looking right across the street at the cruise ship terminal. This is an ideal location, although the south tower would have been just slightly closer. The Carnival Elation was docked and we were so close that we could pick up their WiFi signal from our room! After eating lunch at the English-style pub downstairs, Rachel went back to the room while the boyz and I headed off to see the USS Midway.

After being decommissioned in 1992, this aircraft carrier was moved to a pier just a few hundred yards south of the cruise ship terminal and opened as a museum in 2004. We took the self-guided tour of the ship through the crew quarters, ready rooms, hangar deck, flight deck, and engine room. We then went on a guided tour of the island and got to see the primary flight control center, the navigation center and the bridge. It's an amazing ship, and I'd highly recommend it while in San Diego.

At this point it was about 4:30 and starting to get a little chilly, so we decided to walk back to the hotel. We spent a little time relaxing and watching TV (the last time for a week for me and Rachel), watched the Carnival ship pull out, and then got ready for dinner. The hotel has 3 restaurants in it, one of which is a Ruth's Chris Steakhouse. Rachel and the boyz had never been to one, so we thought it would be a nice first dinner. After some grumbling about having to dress up from Tim, we we walked over. They were doing quite a business, but we had made reservations and were seated after a short wait. For those of you who have never been, Ruth's Chris is all about big servings of expensive beef seared with a 1800 degree infrared broiler and served in sizzling butter on 500 degree plates. In fact, there was so much sizzling butter that we were asked to hold our napkins in front of is as we were served. It was quite a show, and the food was very good too. I think we all decided that it was good to have gone once, but probably not worth the money to go again.

It was then off to bed, looking forward to tomorrow. Tim noticed that the pillows were labeled "soft" and "firm," but there seemed to be little difference.