Mancini Media

I started a post this summer, but I never posted it.  That time is now even though it’s not done.

Doing the potpourri posts is Rebecca’s thing, but since this blog is so dead that I’m one step away from deleting it, I’ll add do one more post and see if another one follows.

Starting last spring before school ended.  Madison was in the school play.  She was our cute little Newsie.

Madison has also been taking dance classes and she had a performance.

Brooke’s favorite band came to town and Rebecca decided to join Brooke in going to the concert.  Brooke was in heaven!

Spencer graduated from elementary school.  He’s a middle schooler now.

We had a day of fun with the Thomas family.  We did an escape room and trampoline parks.

This summer was our stake’s youth trek.  Here’s Caroline and Madison modeling Caroline’s trek clothes.

Rebecca and I are going to be celebrating our 20th wedding anniversary this year and we decided that to celebrate we should go on a cruise.  Since our actual anniversary is in December we took an early victory lap to avoid the cold of winter.  We had taken our honeymoon in San Diego and the misery of the soggy and cold clothes we got when sitting in the splash zone at Sea World still resonated after all these years.

We booked our cruise with Royal Caribbean.  Not that we have much of anything to compare them to, but we think they are great!  Service was exceptional.

I find it mind blowing that they are able to have so much stuff on a ship and not have it drop to the bottom of the ocean.  We learned that the ship we were on is one of the smaller ones.  I read that a new ship that will be launching next year weights 250,800 tons.  What a monster!  We may have to go on another cruise just to witness that size of ship.

Our original itinerary was to go to Cabo, Mazatlan, then Puerto Vallarta, but as we were leaving LA the captain announced that they were looking at a low pressure system near Puerto Vallarta that had the possibility of becoming a hurricane.  It did…  Here’s the captain explaining the hurricane.

The new plan would be to go to Cabo, a short day at Mazatlan, then book it out of there back heading north ahead of the hurricane.

In Cabo, you have to tender to shore; there is nowhere to actually dock. When we got to Cabo the crew was able to get one group off the ship onto the tender without incident, but because of the swells they were having issues being able to get others onto the boat for shore, so they cancelled all the rest of the trips ashore.  As a result this is all that we got to see of Cabo.

Looks quite nice right?  We we a bit disappointed, but the crew organized additional entertainment and activities for us to enjoy.

We later learned at dinner from our table-mates who made it ashore with the first group that Cabo wasn’t very much fun at all. They had a miserable time on shore.  The beaches we all closed and there was feces all over the streets.  They weren’t able to get back onto the boat until the end of the day when the tender boat made only one trip hoping to be able to get the people back on the cruise ship.  We watched them come back and it looked a bit precarious.

Our next stop at Mazatlan went a lot better because the cruise ship was able to tie up to the dock.

After a taxi ride straight from Grand Theft Auto, we arrived at the tourism area of Mazatlan.

Our first stop was to a Catholic church.  This picture best shows just how hot it was there.  When Rebecca checked the weather prior to our trip, she didn’t understand how it could be 80° but feel like 115°.  We now understand!  It was boiling hot.

We stopped by a flea market to pick up some trinkets for the kids.  It was interesting to see.  The restroom situation is entire story in itself.

The meat in the market was… questionable.  There was no way those open air refrigerators were keeping the meat cool enough in the stifling heat of that building.  It even smelt like food poison.

No visit to Mazatlan would be complete without a pilgrimage to Abbey Road to pay homage to Mazatlan’s native boys: Los Beatles.

We spent much of our afternoon walking along the coastline.  The beaches were closed due to the high waves caused by the hurricane.

Sure OSHA is an American thing, but this company needs to have their business license revoked.  Tree limbs instead of 2X4’s?  Really?

The heat ultimately did us in and we returned to the ship early.  There is a blue line in the ground and if you didn’t follow the blue line that leads from the port to the downtown, you were likely to be murdered.  We chose to risk death by murder over auto accident, so we walked.

Our next stop was Ensenada.

People were hitting us up at every step trying to convince us to buy their souveniers.

Enjoying the Cabo sunset

Most mornings I was up much earlier than Rebecca, so I’d slip out and wander the ship with my camera.

We ate ice cream.. Lots of it.

One of our favorite things was to watch the ocean.

Formal night at dinner.

The piano player liked riding up and down the elevator.

We enjoyed all of the performances in the theater.

Our new friends and dinner mates.  I’m kind of sad we didn’t get their contact info.

Our cruise director was a lot of fun.

I had the opportunity to try escargot since the kids are expecting us to eat it when we go to France. Now that I’ve tried it, I don’t need to eat it again. Ever.

The crew sang happy anniversary to us and we enjoyed a slice of desert.

Adele has some new fans after we saw the Adele tribute concert.

These icons are all over the ship.  It took me almost all week to figure out that is a the symbol of a firehose.

All in all it was a great trip despite the hurricane and missed ports. I sure do love my wife of 20 years!

Oops. I forgot to post this…five months ago…

Anyway, let’s wrap up our Disneyland trip! Our last park day was California Adventure one more time. Once again we got up bright and early to eat our hotel breakfast. Unfortunately, this time breakfast did not agree with Dallas and…he barfed. After a short cat nap, he rallied, and we all walked to the park.

Luckily Dallas recovered pretty quickly. He sat out on most of the higher-intensity rides, but he didn’t barf again and held up well as the day progressed. No one else got sick, so I don’t know what was up with him.

Our first stop of the day was Radiator Springs Racers.

Then Monsters Inc.

Madison had money to spend and was eyeing the cotton candy all week. Today she finally indulged:

I took the big kids to Guardians of the Galaxy while Dallas took Madison to a dance party and to talk to Crush:

The Guardians of the Galaxy line was really long. Spencer’s favorite thing to do was carefully balance the chain links so that one of them was oriented perpendicular to the rest. Then we’d see if any of his perpendicular links survived as we snaked back around. Whatever it takes to pass the time!

We had to make time to draw Stitch:

Spencer needed a break from wearing his glasses and found a good spot for them on the Ferris wheel:

We loved drawing so much we had to draw Groot:

We ended our day in a really long Soarin’ line. Long lines make us do weird things:

On our last day we decided to walk through Downtown Disney. On our way we passed A Mart. We had passed A Mart everyday on our walk to the parks and today was the day we finally went inside. Caroline bought a giraffe for Spencer. Such a nice sister:

After our morning stroll through Downtown Disney, the weather had warmed up enough to brave the beach.

All too soon our week of fun was over.

We had such a fun trip and are so glad we were able to enjoy the week together.