Mexican Riviera Cruise - Cabo San Lucas

 Our third and final day in Port was in Cabo San Lucas. We booked a 2 hour dolphin encounter to start the day off. We had to ride the ferry from the ship to the shore since it is too shallow for the cruise ship to pull all the way up to the dock.

We met up with our excursion leader and he told us to wait under this canopy until they were ready to go.

Then we walked through the town past all of the people trying to sell us goods and rides for the day to the dolphin enclosure. Honestly, we did a lot of waiting around without even being able to see the dolphins or the pool where we would meet them. We had to remove everything except our swimsuits and a lifejacket. This included jewelry, hairbands, watches, etc. We almost had to leave Ashley behind because she refused to take off her necklace. We decided not to force her to remove her ponytail, too, after it was such a struggle to get her necklace off of her neck. We were finally led up to the pool after all of our belongings were stowed, including our cameras. Yes, this was another excursion with a professional photographer to capture the experience for us (which also included a hefty price tag at the end). The 20 or so people on our excursion were split into 2 groups. We were with a different trainer and dolphin than Brian and Maryn's family. We had 2 ladies added to the group with our family. The encounter was all that we had expected. We had lots of opportunities to touch our dolphin (named Lokai, or something like that). We also each had opportunities to get in the water with the dolphin to dance with him, hug him, and get a kiss from him. We also got to stand on the side of the pool and have him give us each a high five. And we also had a water fight with him, which he won. LOL. It was really cool and we learned a lot about dolphins during the experience. One interesting fact is that dolphins are really soft because they shed their skin like every 2 hours. It must come off in little pieces because I certainly have never seen a dolphin skin floating by in the ocean. We had considered buying this photo package since we passed on the last one until we heard that it would be over $400 to have our pictures. We quickly told them no thank you and moved on. They tried to talk us into just the pictures of the kids for like $350, but we still were not interested. We don't have any photos of the experience (except our memories). We really enjoyed it, though.

After we were done with the dolphins, we walked through the town to a public beach. We had brought some snorkels to try out in the water. The kids did not last very long with their snorkels, though. We overlooked lifejackets, so they couldn't go very far out. The adults tried it out after the kids were done.

The kids played on the beach in the sand.

Most of us were not able to see very much sea life with the snorkels. I swam all the way along the deepest part of the water that we could swim towards the rocks at the side of the beach and I actually saw quite a few different kinds of fish, especially over by the rocks.

After the beach, we walked through town and got some more souvenirs on our way back to the ferry. We also saw a lot of sea life on the shore. They were obviously not scared of people.

That is a huge fish hanging behind Tyler in the picture below.

We took these pictures right before getting on the ferry.

As we were heading out of port a couple of hours later, we were out on the pool deck. We never made it out to the famous arco in Cabo while we were there, so we got a look at it as our cruise ship passed by.

We really enjoyed our cruise and it didn't even get the kids too far behind in school, being out for a week. We really missed having Alyssa there with us. She would have loved all of the beach time, warm weather, adventures, and tagalog speaking (LOL).

Mexican Riviera Cruise - Mazatlan

 For our second day in port, we went to a beach resort in Mazatlan. They took us on a bus out to the resort and gave us a short city tour on the way.

We had hoped that being on a resort would eliminate the people selling us stuff on the beach, but it was still a public beach area, so we got approached about 100 times while sitting there. We found a nice spot to sit in the shade while the kids played in the ocean.

They gave us 2 drink tickets each and a ticket to get into the lunch buffet. A lot of us got virgin Pina coladas and strawberry daiquiris.

Lunch was mexican food and it was so good. The view was pretty amazing, too.

Right before lunch, we gave up our spot on the beach with the plan to enjoy the resort pools that afternoon. There were like 6 different pools. The water was pretty cold, but felt nice once we got used to it.

We found this jungle looking walkway that led to some caves and rocks. Deep inside of them, there was a cliff jump that a lot of the kids went off of.

These gigantic iguanas were on the rocks and fences in this area, too.

The warmest pool was this kids pool with racing slides. The slides were bumpy and a bit rough going down, but the kids still had fun.

We ended the day in a volleyball pool. Even the dads got in the water to play.

We had to leave around 2 to head back to the ship. It was a relaxing day and a lot of fun.

Mexican Riviera Cruise - Puerto Vallarta

Our first stop on the cruise was Puerto Vallarta. Fortunately, we were there before the civil unrest broke out there a few weeks later. It's a good thing, too, because our excursion there was the highlight of the cruise for our family. Danny and I had done this excursion about 9 years ago when we did this cruise with the Miner family adults. We thought it was one of the coolest things either of us had ever done in our lives and we wanted our kids to experience it, too. It is called an outdoor adventure. The day started with a 30-minute catamaran ride to this bay full of pelicans.

Shortly after we started the boat ride, we stopped to see some whales in the area. It was a momma and baby whale. I didn't quite get the picture of the whales before they went under again.

Here is the bay. The boat on the left side of the picture is full of pelicans.

After the boat ride, we got onto these big jeeplike vehicles for a rough ride up the mountain.

When we got to the base camp, we had the chance to use the restrooms and changing rooms before getting our gear on. At this point, we also had to leave behind all of our belongings, including our cameras. But they did let us take a quick picture with the gear before we stowed everything away.

The next thing we did was get on the back of a mule for a climb up the mountain. It was funny to see some of the mules compete for the front. Any time one would start running, all of the others around it would run, too. 

After the mule ride, we started the ziplines. The first 2 were pretty average, with the second one being a bit longer. From there, every zipline changed. We rappelled down a waterfall, ziplined down into water, hung upside down, stood on a surfboard, rode a roller coaster zipline with a plunge under the water at the end, dropped straight down off of a platform, and rode some waterslides. It was so much fun! The kids loved it. Camden was just sad because he came off of his pad on the last waterslide and it was really slow for him. All of the kids thought that the rappel down the waterfall was the scariest one. 

After we finished, they showed us our pictures that the camera guy had taken for us along the way. They looked really cool, but we all decided that we could store the memories in our heads, rather than paying the $200 they were asking for them. We got chips and salsa and guac after that and had some time to hang out a bit.

While we were eating, we saw this HUGE spider in the tree.

After the whole excursion group got done on the ziplines, we got back on the jeep things and rode down the mountain again. Then we got back on the catamaran for the boat ride back. We stopped at these arches and cool rocks on the way back.

After we got off the catamaran's we walked back to cruise ship. We passed through the little tourist booths to pick out some souvenirs when we got close to the ship. We got each of the kids a t-shirt and then got back on the ship. The military guys wouldn't let us get a picture with them, so we just got our own picture with the ship before heading on.

There was a family that ended up on the same jeep as us and were just in front of us on the ziplines that we talked a bit with that day. They also had 4 kids (2 boys and 2 girls) and were from Idaho. We found out after talking with them that their oldest son was graduating this year and heading out on a mission. After the tour, we started seeing them all over the ship for the rest of the week.