Cabo San Lucas

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Today was another return port for us. We have been everywhere before since Astoria. Today's port would have been unrecognizable since our last visit except for El Arco at Land's End. There has been a lot of construction here since 2006. Also there was a lot of recent mud flooding damage still evident from a tropical storm a couple of weeks ago.

We slept in again, or I did. We had breakfast at Terrace. We arrived at anchorage while we were sitting in Horizons waiting to get back in the cabin. We are tendering from the starboard side today. We are in the shade but the port side has the arch view and the view of the tender port. Lunch was not served in time for most of the tours to attend. We had to be in the Regatta Lounge at 12:05 and earlier lunch was Waves Grill at 11:30am. We had snacks from Baristas and I had a frozen coffee from about 11:30 to about noon. We got called to our tender shortly after 12:05pm. We were bus 10. They had a lot more tours here. We went to San Jose del Cabo on the Art District tour. We were 43 people on a bus. Our guide said he had never had more than 24 people on this tour before. We are traveling Oceania style. We started with a beer sampling at Puerto Paraiso mall. It is the 3rd location of Baja Brewing. The other 2 are closed due to mud flood damage and remodeling. They gave 3 very small samples to everyone and 2 slices of pepperoni pizza. We were not told about the pizza before hand or we'd have all worried less about missing lunch. Clay bought me a full-size root beer for $8USD! Nothing was cheap here. I looked at an embroidered Mexican blouse that was about $60USD.  Clay has drunk his 4 beers from Vancouver and thought he'd have a chance to buy some here but they weren't selling. I guess because their facility was closed by 8 feet of mud 2 weeks ago. Clay found a convenience store in the mall where he bought 6 Mexican beers for $6USD. A deal! We visited an art gallery at the mall before busing to San Jose. We visited a mission church that is old but not the original there from the 1700s. Then we visited another gallery that specialized in Huichol art. We had about 40 minutes of free time but not much was open because of the storm damage and renovations. We were back onboard by 5pm. Last tender is 5:30pm and sailaway is 6pm.

Last night we got a note that our Guatemala excursion has been increased to 6 hours to allow free time to sightsee or eat in Antigua. Finally a ray of common sense from the excursions department. Originally we had signed up for one of 2 7+hour tours to Antigua. They canceled it and a couple of days later they canceled the 2nd one. This originally 5 hour tour was the last left to Antigua. The remaining tours were a safari zoo, a  coffee tour or a macadamia nut tour. The port stop is not long enough to get to any of the Mayan ruins which Guatemala is known for. We are increasingly bothered by this pattern of short, or worse shortened, port stops by Oceania. You look at an itinerary and like it only to find by the time you're booking shore excursions that you can't do what you wanted there.

If the seas aren't too rough, we eat up at Terrace. Fingers crossed. We move the clocks ahead another hour tonight. Good news is tomorrow is a sea day so we can sleep in. Next port is the last in Mexico, Acapulco. This is another return port for us. We toured independently in Acapulco in 2006 and had a great day. This time we'll be on another of our 7 included Oceania tours at $199 or less, The Historical, traditional and picturesque tour. It will go to cliff divers and the fort museum which we've seen before but also to a chapel that we haven't.

The Captain came on the loudspeakers as we were leaving Cabo to let us know that we'd be sailing within 50 nautical miles of TS Pilar and hoped we wouldn't notice. I hope so too. We saw a group of big black dolphins swimming north as we sailed south.

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