Fri, 01/17/25 Puerto Vallarta, Mexico

Day 13 – Friday, January 17, 2025 - Puerto Vallarta

Because we didn't have to get off the ship until 9:30, we went to breakfast on the 7th floor. We had our normal breakfast. I was pretty confident that we had a tour, unlike Guatemala where I was unsure. There was good communication between me and the tour guide. We get off the ship with no issue. We had to walk through a pretty extensive shopping center. We could buy everything from T-shirts to high end alcohol. They were big on duty free. We went all the way to the end where there were several vans parked. We did not see our guy anywhere, so Mary called him. As it happens, he was walking from his van to where we were standing. When he picked up the phone, he was 50 feet from us. His name was Rafael. We did introductions as we loaded into the van. It was a real van with a real lift. It had tie downs. I felt secure. Little did I know, I was going to need to feel secure. For the first part of the trip, we drove about an hour outside of town. Almost the entire way was cobblestone. What is worse than cobblestone is that they had speed bumps literally every 500 feet or so. I don't think he made it to 3rd gear for that hour, he says cars last about 10 years. I can imagine that because of the bouncing. I had to hang on for dear life.

We drove out to a place called Los Arcos National Marine Park. I did not get out of the van because there really was no place to do that. Mary got out and took pictures. It is a natural phenomena. Apparently, you can scuba dive and swim around the various aspects of the park. Somewhere, there are caves you can scuba dive into.  We did not see any of this because we were on the roadway about 150 feet up from the water. There was a little shopping center there so Mary bought T-shirts and refrigerator magnets. Of course, we were on the hunt for Monster and post cards. We're back down to cobblestone central. We drove around for a while where we pulled up to what looked like a post office. Mary talked to the postman. We ended up buying stamps in hopes that we would find postcard somewhere. She dropped off her Guatemala cards in Mexico. We drove around some more and found Monster and snacks at a grocery store. Mary said it was a real grocery store. I ask her to buy Mexican. So, I got a Mexican chocolate bar. We bought some cookies that look like Oreos but have a different name. There were two or three other things like that. More junk food for the room. Mary had to use the bathroom so Rafael pulled up to, you guessed it, a McDonald's. It didn't look like McDonald's but it sure was. Mary went in and did her business then she bought burger and fries. They tasted like the ones in the states. What this means is we've travelled almost 9000 miles to go to McDonald's.

Channels we bounced our way back to the cruise terminal. We took pictures with Raphael and said our goodbyes. It was a weird tour because those we really saw was the marine park. Other than that, we bounced around the city for about two hours. I'm not complaining because it gave us a good idea of what Puerto Vallarta to looks like. I could never live there. The cobblestones would kill me.

We made our way back through the shopping mall outside of the ship. We've stumbled across postcards. Mary bought 4 postcards. She then took off. She happened to have my phone in her pocket and she was carrying the backpack with the passports and stuff. So I'm in this fairly busy mall with no way to communicate and I can't find Mary. It was one of those things where I stay in place and she will find me or should I wander around and look for her. I knew she was working on the postcards, so I decided to go look for her. As it turns out she was about 200 feet away putting addresses on postcards. A lesson learned, I have to make sure I have my phone with me at all times. It would have been a good time for her to abandon me if she had any thoughts of that.

Now she had the postcards. She bought the stamps previously. Now the game became where's the post office box to mail them. So far in Colombia, Guatemala, Costa Rica and Mexico you would think that mail services would be a no brainer. Actually, the opposite is true. They have little or no mail services in all of those countries. They probably live through e-mail and smartphone apps. Just seems strange to me. A lady who understood English asked aroud for a mailbox. There were none in the area and they all pointed us back to the post office where we bought the stamps which was now about 30 minutes away by car. That wasn't happening. One of the store owners said that he would put them in the mail for us. He said it would be his personal favor to us. I will be interested to see if they actually made it into the mail. Again, it's one of those things - Mary wants done, Mary gets done.

Back on the ship we unloaded our purchases. It was a little after 3 o'clock. We have dinner reservations at 5:45 so they gave us a couple of hours to do our thing period and we took a nap. It was one of those days where I just couldn't wake up. I took an hour nap which felt good. We set up the GoPro to take a time lapse of the ship leaving. Hopefully I'll be able to post that on the website. The time lapses are pretty cool.

A couple of days earlier we paid for another fancy wine dinner. This one was fancier than the last one. This one centered around the wines from the Caymus  family. There's a picture that I will post, but there were 5 wines. I will do some research, but I can't imagine any of these bottles was less than $100. I did not do an exact count but there were about 20 people around this big table. There were three courses with dessert. We had a sparkling wine, Chardonnay, pinot noir and Cabernet Sauvignon. Each one was better than the next. Mary liked all of them which was shocking. For food, my first course was an oyster mushroom marinated in something. Mary had beef carpaccio. The things she did better than me. Everyone had a risotto for the second. For the main course, I had salmon. Mary had beef tenderloin. Again, she did better than me. I should have had the beef tenderloin. That's okay, I was fixated on the wine. Very successful dinner. I keep trying to watch what I eat, with then I run into incredible food washing it down with incredible wine. I know, I know, I’ve got problems.

By the time dinner was over we were both tipsy, so we came upstairs. I pretended to work on the crossword puzzle while Mary pretended to do whatever she was doing. It wasn’t a long before we were in bed.

I'm back to my not sleeping well. So, I lay there and staring at the ceiling for a couple of hours. We gained another hour. We are now in Mountain time. We gain one more hour tonight so we will be in Pacific time.

It's another successful day. Only about 103 more to go…