Spring Break

Dave says: A few weeks ago I saw a news story that there had been a few incidents over the winter of large numbers of people getting the flu on cruise ships. I'm sure most people who saw this news story were less inclined to book a cruise. However, I thought that this potential negative publicity and resultant reduction in demand looked like great timing in terms of getting a great deal on a last minute cruise for spring break. We may have rolled the dice, but the result was a week of fun (and no illness) on the Mexican Riviera. 

We started the trip by driving over to Malibu where we camped at Malibu State Park for two nights. This gave us time to do some biking and hiking around the area. There were some fun trails including this one to the set where the show MASH was filmed and also some ridiculously steep fire road climbs and descents. We spent a bit of time on the beach in Malibu and also rode our bikes along the coast from Santa Monica to the south on a crowded but exciting path.

We boarded the Norwegian Star for a week of warm, sunny weather and set sail. This ship was pretty nice with good food and some interesting evening entertainment (particularly the acrobatics). My plan was to get to the evening show right as the doors were opening and sit in the very front row, center seat which made for a more exciting experience.

We pulled into Cabo on the same day as three other cruise ships. I thought the town would be completely overrun but it wasn't that bad. We took a questionable boat ride out to land's end ant got dropped off at lover's beach. We hiked back into town by climbing over some rocks and walking for a few miles. Cabo was the most desert-like stop but the rocks were pretty cool here.

The next day was Mazatlan. We booked a city tour with bus rides to the major attractions. These included a famous church, the market, the coast, a museum, and the new fancy part of town. After the tour was over, we went out on a catamaran to an island across the harbor for a fun tour. We always felt safe but there was a strong police presence in Mazatlan with many armored vehicles and police with machine guns.

My favorite port was Puerto Vallarta which has not only beautiful beaches but also a tropical climate and nearby mountains. Here, we booked an atv tour which went through cobbled streets through the rural areas and then out onto some dirt roads. I love driving atvs and it was a lot of fun but I'm not used to driving in a caravan style with tons of dust. After the atv trip, we looped back through the old part of town, along the beaches, and through most of the city for about a five mile walk back to the ship. The town felt like the nicest of our three stops and there was a lot to see along the way.

Spring Time

Alisha says: At the beginning of March my mom came to visit us for a few days. She taught me how to cook dutch oven peach cobbler and dutch oven potatoes. They turned out delicious!

Tucson has experienced a very mild winter this past year. To tell you the truth, I don't know if the temperature even ever dropped below 32 degrees F. We are truly spoiled. We finally got one really good rainstorm and this awesome rainbow could be seen from our backyard when the sun came out.

Dave and I took a break from road biking, mountain biking and hiking for a day and went caving at Peppersauce Cave out by Oracle. It is a fun cave because it isn't too big that you worry about getting lost (although I still get all turned around) but you can still spend about 2 hours in the cave to explore all of it. There are some big open spaces and some tight squeezes. After caving we decided to take the focus up the fire road backside of Lemmon. Since we don't have a four wheel drive vehicle Dave likes to test the limits of our city cars occasionally. The road was in good shape and we didn't have any problems.

I had the opportunity to host three of the riders from the Optum Pro Women's Cycling Team while they were in town for a few races and a training camp. After being hosted myself by kind people while I was racing pro it was great to be able to get to return the favor and be the host. We had our regular winter visitor, Lauren and her awesome teammates Janel and Denise stay with us. They cleaned up at the races. Lauren lapped the field solo to win the Old Pueblo Criterium.