Larsen Family Love

We have this great group of friends that we love to cruise with. We planned another getaway for January 2011. We booked a 7 day Mexican Riviera cruise on the Carnival Splendor. Anyone remember what happened to the Carnival Splendor? Oh yeah, it caught on fire and was put out of commission for 3 months. At first we thought the Splendor would be up and running two weeks before our cruise, but in December we received a call from our travel agent that they had just canceled additional sailings through February. Because our entire group already had time off we re-booked on the Holland America Oosterdam. It sailed out one day later and hit all the same ports. All was good... right?

Wrong... Turns out Holland America is a mecca for senior citizens. An entire ship full of senior citizens made for quite the interesting and boring cruise.

As we were sailing to our first port, the Captain decided because of the violence in Mexico, to change our cruise path, delete a stop and add a different city, which changed all of our original port days! Yeah, not good. All of the plans we had made in port were all messed up and we didn't even know anything about the new city we were going to.

We stopped in Puerto Vallarta and had booked an all day canopy tour with Vallarta Adventures. (http://www.vallarta-adventures.com). It was awesome, we rode a jet boat, some kind of 4x4 utility vehicle up the mountain, rode donkeys for 30 minutes and then zip lined and repelled down this huge mountain. One of the funnest adventures ever!

These are some of the photos that we took on the Vallarta Adventure. Once we reached the top of the mountain (after the 4x4 ride but before the donkey's) they made us up our backpacks and cameras away, so the only shots we got were the ones we bought from the tour company.


Another stop was Cabo San Lucas. We had originally booked a snorkeling tour but because our ship came a different day and wasn't in port longer than 6 hours we just ended up going on a quick boat tour and had them drop us off on a beach to snorkel.

Our final stop was Mismaloya. We had absolutely no idea what to do, because the port was added after we had already sailed. So when we got off the boat we just talked to vendors and ended up taking a taxi ride to a beach. We spent the day in the sun, drinking margarita's and eating the best guacamole I have ever tasted. I could have lived on that stuff! While we were a the beach, one of our friends found this crab!

This is our friend Phil. He was being quite funny in the room one night so we shot some video. The video quotes our favorite saying from the captain "It's just the motion of the ocean" like it would be anything else rocking the boat, lol, cause it wasn't a Carnival Ship, this one was just full of seniors!