Day Eight - Get on the Fun Ship!

Mat on our balcony

We are halfway through the honeymoon and on to the cruise! We woke up Sunday morning and I just did not want to get out of bed. Grr... I really wanted to sleep in that nice, dark hotel room. But I knew I had to get up and get to the ship. So I put on my bride tanktop (hoping we might get a room upgrade or something!) and we headed back to the airport to return our car. So we hopped on the shuttle back to LAX and while we were on the shuttle, we saw a couple that had Carnival Pride luggage tags on their suitcases, so we decided to follow them to find out where the shuttle was leaving from. Our original idea was to take a cab, but we were worried that it might be a ton of money.

So we found the shuttle and they said they might be able to fit us on, but we had to wait. So as we were waiting, a different couple came up and asked us if we had bought our tickets for the shuttle yet or did we want to take a cab with them? So we decided to split a cab and it was quite pricey, but wasn't too bad since we split it. So we drop off our luggage and go to stand in the longest line in the whole world. Luckily, the couple from the cab didn't have luggage, so they had saved us a place in line and we didn't have to wait as long as we probably would have. After what felt like hours, we finally got our room keys and got on the ship!!

We did our life boat drill and this was the lovely picture we took while we were there! Our room worked out to be great. We decided to go with the "guaranteed balcony", which meant that we might get an obstructed view and we didn't get to pick the location of our room. But we ended up with a great location near the back and we thought it was nice and quiet the whole time. AND it was totally like three floors below the food or three floors above the food, depending on where we ate! Mat and I decided (maybe it was really me deciding) that we were going to take the stairs everywhere in the ship. We actually stuck to this pretty well, except a couple times here and there. So even if we were on the 2nd floor, we still would walk up 8 flights to get to the 10th floor. We figured that might even out all the eating we did. Maybe.

We finally pulled out of the port around 4:30 pm or so, we were off! We would sail for the entire evening and then the next two days before we pulled into our first port. So after we set sail, our cabin stewardess came by our room to introduce herself and see if we needed ice. She was very sweet and always did a great job turning down and making up our room. I think the next few hours we spent just walking around the boat trying to get a feel for where everything was. Our dinner seating was at 8:15, so we headed down a few minutes early and waited with a jillion other people who had the same idea.

Our waiter was awesome! His name was Manuel and he was just the nicest guy. His helper on the ship was polite, but not very friendly. He wasn't mean or anything, but just didn't smile hardly ever and I think wanted to throw Mat off the side of the ship when he would ask for more bread! We did have a table just for two. It was good because we could eat and leave and didn't have to worry about waiting for other people to order and that sort of thing. But it was not so good because we didn't really get to meet anyone since we sat alone. That night I was so excited because they had creme brulee and then it came out and it was not so good. So that was disappointing. After dinner, we headed to get a seat for the first show on the cruise and settled in to see some fabulous entertainment.

The show that night was not too bad, they just had two singers and a handful of dancers that did a few song and dance numbers. Then, they brought out a comedian, Lowell Sanders, who was actually pretty funny. He did an all ages show that night and performed the next day for an R rated crowd. That was just about it for our first day and night on the boat!

Day Seven

Wow. This honeymoon wrap up is taking a lot longer than I had thought! I really did want to write about each day because the further we get away from the honeymoon the less we are going to remember!

So back to LA. The night before, Mat and I had gone to Ralph's (their local grocery store that we basically had to go to everyday for something!) and bought some breakfast to keep in our room. I bought some bagels and he got some yummy cinnamon rolls. So that was our breakfast of champions before heading out to Universal Studios.

Boy, was I excited to get to Universal Studios! I really love theme parks in general and throw in movie themes and that makes for a great place. We are so funny. I feel like you already know what we did right when we got through the gate. You guessed it! We got a map of the park, planned out our attack and got a locker to put up the camera and my purse when we weren't using it.

We headed to the new Simpsons Ride first because we figured it would fill up fast since it was one of the newer attractions. We barely had to wait ten minutes (or less) before we got on the ride! This day had started off perfectly! Then we just started hitting the rides that were close by and we really never had to wait for any of them! I was surprised since it was a Saturday that it wasn't busier. It did get busy after lunch, but by then we had done a lot of the rides and had moved on to the shows. The shows usually you have a specific time to see it, so we kind of timed everything out to just hop from one to another. Everything was fun and we had a great time! We decided to bring our smaller camera with us, so the pictures aren't that great. One fun thing for any of you Desperate Housewives fans - we drove down Wysteria Lane! As part of their backlot tour, we drove down the actual street they use for filming the show. Mat and I haven't ever watched the show, but it was still fun to see the houses. You can see all our pictures by clicking on the picture below.
That night we headed back to CityWalk for dinner at Karl Strauss Brewery. It was pretty good food. Then we headed back to the hotel, stopping on the way to spy on someone having a wedding at 9:30 at night! It was so strange, we were just walking back and it was in the courtyard of our hotel. We were way back in the shadows (geez, that sounds creepy), so no one saw us! But we didn't stay for long. We thought about going to the reception, but decided against that one! HA!

And that concludes week one of our honeymoon. Next stop, Long Beach on Day Eight to leave on our cruise!

Day Six

Maybe I'm crazy, but I thought I would go right into day six! I know, two in one night! But much of Friday was driving, so I think I can wrap it up pretty fast for my loyal readers. So we got up for our last breakfast at the Embassy Suites and we totally got up too late. We got down in time to eat, but there was basically nothing left and about 100 people trying to get the last bagel. I think Mat pushed a girl for a crumb of bacon.


After we checked out, we headed straight to the outlet mall. I know! I have such an awesome husband who will go shopping with me. It was on the way to LA and we just figured we should check it out. We pulled in to the parking lot, but then pulled right back out after Tabitha directed us to a local donut shop. We really didn't get enough breakfast and donuts had been on our agenda all week! So we had some tasty donuts from a donut shop that smelled like poop. Then we headed right back to the outlet mall to begin our shopping adventure. Well, I tried on a lot of things, but didn't find one thing I wanted to buy. Mat, on the other hand, found a few shirts at his favorite - Banana Republic.


It was then time to head to the lovely city of Los Angeles! So we're driving, we're driving and then all of a sudden, Tabitha tells us that there is a delay and should she route us around the delay? Well, the delay was only 2 minutes, so we figured that was silly. Well, it kept going up and up and by then we were in the middle of it. So traffic in LA is awesome. We did get to our hotel eventually and we even saw the Hollywood sign on the way to it! We checked into our hotel (right next to Universal Studios) and then ventured out to Hollywood Boulevard. Here is our only picture of that adventure:

It was crazy and packed with people, but we did see it and now Mat never has to go back! After that we headed right back to our hotel to get ready for dinner. Since we were so close to Citywalk, we decided to eat there so we didn't have to navigate the streets of LA. We just walked right over and went straight to Cafe Tu Tu Tango - a restaurant that I loved from my visit to Hollywood over 8 years ago! It's a fun little place where you get several appetizers instead of one big meal. My favorite!

And that was about it for day six. Crazy, huh? Well, be on the lookout for day seven. It's going to be a real doozy!

Day Five

Day five! We started out with a free breakfast - just the way we like our breakfasts! If I haven't already said so, you really need to be staying at Embassy Suites if you can when you travel. They are so nice! Not only do they have a free hot breakfast, they also have a little happy hour with not very good drinks. Since it was our last day in San Diego, we figured we ought to hit the beach. So we drove over the Coronado Bridge to Coronado Island (which I don't think is an actual island) and stopped to play in the water.
As you can see from the picture below, I thought it was freezing. But it was still fun walking on the beach!
I decided that we needed one picture of our feet in the sand, but I wanted to go to the sand where it was nice and fluffy. It was 8000 degrees! Seriously, I couldn't believe how warm the sand was. So we snapped a quick picture before darting back to the cooler patch.
After Coronado, we decided that we wanted to check out the rest of Balboa Park. For everyone who doesn't know, Balboa Park is this big park in the middle of San Diego that contains the San Diego Zoo, as well as multiple other museums and a botanical garden. A botanical garden that was free and we wanted to go and it was closed on Thursdays! So we took a picture of the outside:
We did end up going to a musuem in Balboa Park, but didn't end up taking any pictures there. It was the San Diego Natural History Museum and was pretty interesting. There were a lot of fossils and there were these pretty cool pictures in the Aerial Portraits of the American West exhibit. All the pictures were taken by John Shelton and were taken out of a place, so they really showed the land. You should go to the link to see some examples of his photography.

After the museum, we headed back to the hotel to get cleaned up before our last dinner in San Diego. We decided we wanted Italian, so we chose Buca di Beppo and were disappointed when we found out it was a huge chain restaurant. At least we don't have them in Boise, so it was new to us. Mat and I just usually would rather go to a restaurant that is local to the area. It was pretty good and there was way too much food for us both. Then we headed back to the hotel to get some good old fashioned sleep before we headed out to Los Angeles the next day!

(Click on the first picture for all our pictures from Day Five!)

Day Four

So where were we...ah yes! We left off at Wednesday morning of the first week of our lovely honeymoon! This was the first day we got up for the free breakfast at the Embassy Suites because we decided to sleep in the first day we were there. We knew we were headed to the San Diego Zoo, so we got up in time to get ourselves some breakfast before we headed out to Balboa Park. Tabitha was an excellent guide to get us to the zoo and we definitely got there early enough that there were not that many people at the zoo.

After we bought our tickets, we decided we were heading straight to the panda. We had read in our Frommer's San Diego guide that the lines were often very long at the panda exhibit and that you should get there early in the morning. So we got our map and walked what seemed like a million miles to the panda. We walked past a ton of monkeys and we kept saying "don't look at the monkeys" and laughing because we really were focused on our mission. So we got to the panda and they were sleeping. There was no line, but panda butt isn't the most exciting thing in the world to see. When we did try to go back later, the line was so long, I'm sure we would have waited for quite a long time. I'm glad we did go when we did even though they were sleeping.

(This is a flamingo baby!)
I think we at least attempted to see every animal in the San Diego Zoo. Some of them were asleep, some were feeding behind the scenes, but we really hit the pavement and tried to get to every animal. I think our favorite was the hippo, but we did love the elephants and the giraffes too. They were really all fun to see and we had a great day at the zoo. It was a long day and as the day went on, they just got busier and we got more tired! I think we headed home around 5:30 to take showers and head out to dinner.


We did hit the happy hour at Embassy Suites again because who would really give up free cocktails? This night we decided to go with margaritas because we had decided we wanted Mexican for dinner. (they weren't very good and I don't think either of us finished ours!) The great thing about Tabitha is that you could tell her what you wanted to have for dinner and she would give you a nice list with the closest restaurants/gas stations/parks, etc. that you were interested in. We picked out 4 or 5 mexican places in the gaslamp district and walked by them all before deciding on one. So we sit down and start in on chips and salsa - YUM! Then, they sit this couple right next to us and literally, right next to us, who were on their first date. So of course, they are talking up a storm trying not to have that awkward silence, but Mat and I didn't want to compete, so we just didn't talk for the next hour or so! It was seriously the strangest thing to feel like I was a part of their first date! And FYI, I don't think there will be a second. But we did have another great day in San Diego and if you want to check out all the zoo pictures, just click on the cute little giraffe!

Day Three

Day 3 started out my favorite way - LATE! We decided to sleep in and take our time to get out and go sightseeing. Way back in March I had bought a Frommer's San Diego guide and we've been flipping through it since then. One of the things we wanted to see was the beaches in La Jolla because we've heard they were pretty nice. In the guide, there was a particular beach in La Jolla called Children's Pool that was supposed to have quite a few sea lions just hanging around, so we decided to try to find that. Well, we didn't. The map in the guide wasn't very helpful because it only had a few streets on it and frankly, Tabitha was no help either. We did find a beach and went to put our feet in, but it was chilly and overcast, so not the best beach weather. So we decided to head to Torrey Pines State Park to check that out.

Torrey Pines State Park was this park on the beach where these very rare pine trees grow. They have 8 miles of trails and a beach. We decided to do one of the easy hikes because we both were wearing our flip flops. It was fun to take some pictures and to see the odd little pine trees. We didn't end up going to the beach because we decided we wanted to try to see a movie and we both wanted to get back to the hotel to clean up if we could.

Click on the Torrey Pine Tree for more pictures!

We ended up deciding on Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. Oh geez. We ultimately both enjoyed the movie because it was an Indiana Jones movie, but man, was that story a bad one! We did have some delicious popcorn to tide us over until dinner! Because of the timing with the movie, I wasn't able to shower before the movie, so we walked back to the hotel so I could get ready.

Once I was ready, we headed down to our free cocktail hour at Embassy Suites! It was a little disappointing because the wine they had was really pretty bad, but hey, they were free glasses! After that, we headed to Little Italy, which was again within walking distance. We had dinner at this delicious Italian restaurant called Filippi's. I've been there with Joy before when she lived in San Diego, so I wanted to bring Mat there to try it out! If you are ever in San Diego, you have to check it out.


Day Four to come soon!

Day Two

Sea World Day!!


This might possibly have been our favorite day in San Diego. We knew Sea World opened at 9 because we drove by the night before to check on times, so we tried to get to breakfast by 8ish. Mat and I swore they said there was a buffet or you could order off a menu, but there was no buffet! So we ordered off the menu and got ourselves all checked out and packed into the car. We were close to Sea World, maybe only a two minute drive, so it was super easy and we just pulled right in to a pretty good parking space. So we were so excited and almost running up to the gate and we turn the corner right into a huge line of people! I think this might have been the longest line we stood in all day, well, maybe lunch was long too!


Eventually we got our tickets and got our little park map and being the dorks that we are, we sat down to plan out when we were going to each show and what rides we were going on and in what order. I love my husband! Then we got a locker so we could store our camera and my purse when we didn't need them. Finally, we headed to our first ride, which was a water ride called Journey to Atlantis. It was pretty fun! The rest of our day was spent going to the shows - there was a dolphin show, Clyde and Seamore's (the sea lions) show, Shamu (of course), an amazing pet show and some not very good Cirque de Soleil knockoff. We also stopped to look at the arctic animals, sharks, manatees, sea lions and penguins. There was so much to see and I really think we covered almost everything! If you have never been to Sea World, you have to go sometime! If you have been before, you need to go again! It was a seriously great day, but it wasn't over yet!



We were off to the hotel we would stay in the rest of the time in San Diego, which was downtown, close to the Gaslamp District - Embassy Suites. Tabitha got us there in one piece and our check in was easy. We both got cleaned up and then we decided to walk downtown to get us something to eat! So we walked around a bit and found this bar and grill with outdoor seating, so we decided it was the place for us. We both had pizza and beers and it was heavenly! Nothing like a cold beer after you have been outside all day in the sun.



So Day Two was a complete success! I've included a few pictures of Sea World, but click on the picture of the donkey if you want to see all of day two's pictures!

We're Back!

The honeymoon is officially over! We had such a good time and loved every minute of it. I think we were both ready to come home though when it was finally over. Instead of trying to recap everything in one blog, I thought I would just write about one day at a time!

So here goes...Day 1!

Our first day started not too early - we had to be at the airport around 9:30, so we just decided to treat ourselves to some delicious McDonald's while we waited to board our plane:

We got to Los Angeles around 12:30, so we headed straight to pick up our car and then waited in our first of many lines while we were on vacation. We got our car and Tabitha (our personal navigator in the form of a GPS) and had her direct us to the 1. We were heading down to San Diego, so we decided it would be fun to take the coastal route. It was not that much fun. It took us several hours to get to San Diego and most of it was going through tiny towns that had a million stoplights. Not really what we had in mind, but we at least tried to make it fun! We got to our hotel in San Diego - a Holiday Inn right by Sea World. It was nice and clean and they were crazy about me since I was a rewards member. We got two free breakfasts and they "upgraded" our room.

It was time for dinner and we wanted some Mexican! So we asked Tabitha and she gave us a million Mexican restaurants, so we drove by a couple and ended up in Old Town:

What a fun place! There were all kinds of Mexican restaurants so we were in heaven. We walked around some and took some pictures:

It was definitely time to eat! We decided on one of the places to eat and now I can't even remember the name, but it was definitely not the best Mexican I have ever had. I think it was more about the atmosphere really! So we headed back to the hotel and I think we were asleep by 11:00! We had a big day in store for us because we were heading to Sea World on Day 2!

Happy 4th of July!

Hope everyone has a safe and happy 4th of July! Mat and I are dogsitting tonight. He has to work tomorrow, so we'll probably just watch a movie and call it a night. We have to rest up for the honeymoon anyway!

Honeymoon, you are SO close!

Last night Mat and I went through a whole bunch of stuff on the internet about our cruise and we were so excited! I think we were most excited about the food, but that is one of our favorite activities by far so I'm not too surprised. We are so prepared to sail away it isn't even funny. The first half of our trip in San Diego is going to be great fun. I'm really looking forward to the zoo and Sea World and Universal Studios! I think more than anything, I'm looking forward to seeing Mat enjoy these places. We might try to go to a winery or two, but we're just going to play it by ear and see what happens.

Tonight we'll finish up some work in the yard (at least I hope finish!). I should probably start packing now because I know it is going to take me forever to figure out what I'm taking. Mat said he was just going to take all the clothes he owns. Boys have it so easy! I'm for sure going to come up with a checklist for packing. I think I make at least one list everyday. Sometimes it is work stuff, sometimes housework, sometimes a grocery list, but I sure do love them.

Some very exciting news - we got a railing for our front steps! I know, I know, it is almost too much excitement to take. I think it looks pretty good and we had to have it in order to continue our insurance policy. Here's a beautiful picture (though not taken with our new fabulous camera that we'll be taking on our honeymoon and we'll soon have the best pictures ever):

You can see our new roof too! I think I promised to put that picture up and I know you all just couldn't wait for me to post a picture. It was starting to get dark while I took it, but you get the idea.

Mat's getting his hair cut tonight and I got mine cut last night. We are going to be the cutest little honeymooners there ever were!