Stucki Living!!: Christmas and Cruising!!

Well we decided for Christmas this year we would try a cruise! We have never been before so it was a new experience for us! We want our girls to have memories and we thought we better start doing some adventurous things!
Here is the first picture of all of us on the first night aboard the ship!

Macey is a Chinese food junkie so this was one of the first buffetts she visited- she liked it but not enough to go back again there were so many other choices!!

I love this picture!! It's so cute! The girls got along so well during the whole week and it was fun to see them laugh and have fun together! We are still at the Long Beach port in this picture so it's still early in the cruise!

Macey's favorite movie is Titanic- when I told her we were going on a cruise she said, "Um mom, I have seen Titanic ALOT!!" She got over it! They had to at least try the famous pose from the movie though!

Our stateroom was very small- the wall you can't see is only a few feet away from the bed- in fact Haley has her feet resting on it from the bed!! That is a bunk bed above the king bed and then another one is on the other wall. We are used to our toy hauler/camp trailer so it wasn't to big of a problem!

The first night while we were still right outside of Long Beach it was pretty chilly, Haley was cold so Russ was trying to keep her warm!! So sweet!!

This was the coolest building to me!! It's the biggest thing you see of the coast of Catalina. It's actually a casino- I just thought it was pretty. Catalina reminds me of pictures I have seen of Greece! I think we will be regular visitors!!

A few pictures of us on the beach in Catalina-

Macey thought this pelican was pretty cool even though she was scared it was going to peck her eyes out!! She was sneaking up on it to see how close it would let her get!

This is one of my favorite pictures!! I may just frame it for my house! They were holding hands and everything!!! LOVE IT!!

Catalina has a pretty cool history. It was first owned by the Wrigley family. As in Wrigley's gum, Wrigley's field, owners of the Chicago Cubs!! This is the house that the family still owns on the island.

We took a glass bottom boat tour which was pretty cool even though we didn't see any WAY cool fish, we still saw some neat stuff. This is in the boat- Macey is such a cutie!!!

I absolutley LOVE Catalina- did I say that already?? I am so in love with the way the houses are built on the hills. Our tour guide on our bus ride around the city told us that when the lots were first for sale they were going for about $250, now they are anywhere from $600,000 to $900,000 in the flat of the city and $1.6 to $2.0 million on the hillsides and they are very small lots! They don't get new builds alot because the price to ship all the building materials over is so high!

Back on the ship, Russ was dominating at Mini golf!! We played a few times and then Russ entered a putting tournament so that was a fun feature to have on the ship!

This is just a random street in Ensanada, I just thought it was kinda cool. They also build up into the hill sides because of space.

We went on a tour of the Civic center in downtown Ensanada and I loved it! My kids were kinda bored but I thought it was amazing history! This ceiling was painted similar to the Sistine Chapel that Michael Angelo painted- by a famous Mexican artist all he wanted as payment was room and board. There are about 4 different ceilings painted by him and they are huge ceilings!! It was seriously amazing!!!

This is the famous Seven Deadly Sins bar!! The Margarita was actually invented in this Civic center, not in this bar but in another one in the same building, they were giving free margarita's out but I settled for the bottled water I brought along! The girls and Russ had a Coke though!

In the courtyard of this building they had a few little flea market stands. We visited some in downtown Ensanada as well and I was amazed at how persistant the vendors are!!! We even had a 3 yr old girl and a boy not much older chase us down almost 2 blocks trying to get us to buy their gum!! Sad! Anyway here are a few pictures in that courtyard

This is the La Boufadora blow hole. It is the 2nd largest blow hole in the world. We thought it was pretty cool, it blew really high for us but Irma our tour guide said on a scale of 1-10 it was a 6 kinda day!! Irma was an absolutely amazing tour guide, she was so cute and funny! And she knew a ton of stuff! She really earned her money! The only bad part was that the air conditioner on the bus was not working very well so we were hot and sweaty by the time we were done!

A cute picture of us girls at the blow hole!

This is Irma or as she taught us to pronounce us Eeerrrma! I never could get the rolling r's quite right!! Russ was most excited about us crossing the bridge where the Baja 1000 starts! He thought that was pretty cool.

So you all know that they do these towels in your room every night on the ship, they were really cute! This one was my favorite!

Mini Golf again!!

They had this really cool ice sculpture demonstration. The sculptor did this in about 20 minutes!! Pretty cool!

I snapped this shot myself while Russ and I were waiting for "The Liars Game" to start! I think it's pretty cute! The gameshow type games they played on the ship were hilarious!! They had a great family comedian that we loved as well!

The service that you get while on the ship is amazing!! We were shocked at how everyone remembers your name and is so nice! These guys were our waiters in the dining room. The tall ones name was something confusing like Boutelinaey or something so he told us to call him Booty. The older guy was named Odalong, he told us to remember 'all day long' to remember his name- so we had Booty All Day Long!! So funny!! We sat by the most amazing family at dinner every night and we are all going to stay in touch- they ride ATV's and motorcycles and they want to come up and have Russ take them around here. They had a son whose hair was cut like Justin Beiber so that is what the waiters called him the whole time- everytime they they would walk by our table they would sing a Beiber song! It was hilarious! Russ will probably never call that kid by his real name!

So that was our cruise in a nutshell! We had so much fun and will definately go again!!

I only got a few pictures of Christmas since my girls hate taking pictures. My daddy dresses up as Santa Claus every Christmas Eve to visit all the grandkids and other kids in our ward. Most of my nieces and nephews recognize him so he is Papa Claus for us!!