Monday, July 27, 2009

Gila Cliff Dwellings

This weekend we spent a day in New Mexico to see some cliff dwellings from about 700 years ago. They are called the Gila Cliff Dwellings and are located just outside of Silver City New Mexico. It was a beautiful drive once we got into the mountain area. It took a lot longer than we anticipated, about 4.5 hours! But it was a great day. Here are some of the pictures we got on the digital. The kids had cameras too, but they are on film and we need to get them developed. (But they took all of their pictures before we hit the dwellings, umm like of the car, my rear end.. um and the car window.. I am sure we have about 45 pictures of those!!) We found some other cliff dwellings in southern Colorado that is about 8 hours away, and will try and take a long weekend to go there. Anyway, here are the pictures from this weekend....










Thursday, July 16, 2009

Cruise to Mexico



Our trip was amazing. We had a great time and loved just about every minute of the cruise! This is our stateroom. We had a balcony, so we could go out and just sit outside and relax in our own space. On one of our "fun day at sea" days we spotted many flying fish, manta ray's, sea turtles, sharks and a bright blue fish that was huge! It was super fun!

This is a picture from our balcony of the Queen Mary. There was a concert going on over there so there was live music for our departure.


We went to 3 places in Mexico. Puerto Vallarta, Mazatlan, and Cabo San Lucas. Puerto Vallarta was super humid. I think it was 95* with humidity at 99%! It was all rain forest like. We walked a few miles trying to find a beach to relax on, but it took some time. When we finally found a beach, we jumped in the water and it was refreshing and warm! After swimming for about 5 minutes Joseph noticed an odd shaped and colored thing floating next to him (possible poop) and so we got out. We started our walk up the beach, and we were bombarded by people every 30 seconds trying to sell us things like hair braiding and pot! When we got to the end of the beach we started our way back to the ship and I felt like I was getting a sunburn so I started to walk faster... Big mistake when you are wearing new sandals and your feet are sweating! When we got to our room, I had bad blisters on the bottoms of each foot, and had a hard time walking for about 2 days! It was miserable, but it did not stop us. Later that night we had an excursion planned. We took a boat to a secluded island and had dinner and watched a very neat show. It was beautiful!









Our next stop was Mazatlan, but with my poor feet, we decided to stay on the boat and relax. We watched movies in our room and napped a lot. There is not much else we did other than that. When we docked in Mazatlan, we were next to a shipping yard, so it was not as pretty as we thought it would be.



My absolute, hands down favorite of the trip was Cabo. It is so beautiful there, and I would love to return sometime. We booked a snorkeling excursion later in the day so we went ahead and walked the shops for a couple of hours and looked around. It was not too bad, but it was fun looking at all the miscellaneous things people sell. Unfortunately the snorkeling is on another camera that we need to take to develop but we are not done with the film. Hopefully soon we will have those pictures. Our first stop was neat. There was many, many fish everywhere and they seemed to come right up to you. It was fun. Our second stop was not part of the snorkeling, but our guide told us that the other spot was very busy, so we could just stay in that spot so we did. (there was only about 10 of us on the boat). Our guide snorkeled too, and would dive down into the reef and find things to bring up. (oh and I dropped my mask on the 1rst stop and it went to the bottom of the ocean, but he dove down and got it!!! :)) I would have but I could not go far!! My ears hurt when I would dive.. must have been the salt? Anyway, so while we were there at our second stop, poor Joseph had been drinking a lot of sea water and made him sick, so he fed the fishes for a while... :( We had learned a LOT of lessons for the next time!! lol.
Here is a picture of a beach next to lovers beach. This one had no people on it and it looks beautiful. The next picture is from the famous arch at the very end of Baja California.
The water was so clear, warm and pretty!!!

Even with all of the "bad" things that went down, we still had a great time and are planning another trip when Joseph returns from deployment.