Getting there...

Here's the log of our trip. I'm doing this more for my own benefit than for yours, but hopefully you'll find it somewhat interesting!

We left for California on Friday, May 1st. Our friends from Burley, ID, Shane and Heather Waters came to pick us up at 8:00 a.m. They are very punctual people!!! We, of course, were not ready yet. So, we continued to scramble around getting a few more things here and there packed into our bags. We actually packed pretty light and only brought a total of 3 bags. We were riding with them in their van and we got on the road after running a few errands at 10:20. I still feel so bad that it took so long to get things rolling. Charlie spent the day at our babysitters house, where his brothers joined him after school.

The road trip down went very smoothly thanks to "Lola", the sweet talking GPS system mounted on their dashboard! We hit some ugly traffic in Vegas, but managed to pull in to Paul's sister's house in L.A. around 8:30 or so. It was great to see them and get the chance to spend some time chatting with them.

In the morning, Paul and I went running with his brother-in-law and his friend. We drove across the valley to this mountainous trail which I was warned had a "hill at the beginning". Well, crud, this stinkin trail was wicked hard to run, and not just at the beginning! I made it clear that the guys were not to wait for me and that I'd just follow behind them at my own pace. I ended up running in one direction for 30 minutes and at that point, I saw the guys heading back toward me. Apparently, I wasn't too far behind them, but they had stopped to rest at the top of this peak. So, they quickly got ahead of me again as we ran back. I think I ended up going about 4 miles or so and it was extremely difficult, but I was glad I did it. It was awesome to be running in such a green and beautiful area as the sun was rising over the hills. Great way to start the week!

After showering and packing up again, we set our destination to the port and worked our way there, arriving around 1:00. Getting registered and on the ship was actually a really smooth process and I'm thinking it took less than an hour total. This was WAY different from our first cruise and we were extremely impressed! These pictures were taken as we were waiting to get on the boat. That's Heather. We found our stateroom and put our carry-on stuff down. We walked around the ship for a while and made our way to the front of the ship to watch ourselves sail away. We went to dinner at 6:00 (we had anytime, anywhere dining) with our group and found it nice enough that we opted to eat there every night to get the benefit of having the same waiters serving us all week. Allan from the Phillipines and Oliver from Macedonia (or something like that) were our waiters and they did an excellent job for us... and we weren't always an easy group!!

We also went to the comedy show that night. The comedian was Steve Moris and he was a member of the Beach Boys for 20 years. He was very entertaining mixing a lot of music with his jokes, but unfortunately he wore "stretchy pants" with no underwear, leaving very little to the imagination. Had to keep your eyes focused on his face! YIKES! Anyway, that was a great first night and we were excited for the next day in Santa Barbara!