Farewell to San Diego

It's the day to say good-bye to San Diego because we will board the Celebrity Constellation at 1 p.m today. Since we turned in the rental car last evening, we are just hanging out at the hotel until the shuttle takes us to the ship.

Yesterday was Mark's birthday! I hope he had a good one. I bought him a fabulous lunch at Anthony's Fish Grotto, San Diego's original seafood restaurant, right at the Port of San Diego. I had a fish called Mexican Baquetta from the Sea of Cortez. I never heard of it before, but it seemed similar to a halibut or a sea bass, white and firm. I had it blackened with a special cole slaw with pineapple dressing and steamed vegetables. YUM. Mark had Red Snapper Ranchero with the same sides. We told them not to bring the bread basket, but we did have drinks. I had a peach daiquiri. That used to be my regular drink, but I have not had one in over a year since it's pretty high in calories. Oh, boy, did it taste good! Then I mentioned it was Mark's birthday so they brought us a complimentary Mud Pie dessert. We completely finished the whole thing, but I'm pretty sure I had two-thirds of it myself. Sigh.

The only redemption is that once again there was a lot of walking around. We walked hours and hours yesterday at Old Town and over an hour on the beach at Torrey Pines. Today we walked hours and hours around the Maritime Museum and on the USS Midway. I can only hope that all the walking is helping to use up all these calories. At least dinner was just a Subway salad and two pieces of fruit for a late night snack.

The hotel will provide us breakfast one more time, then we are hoping to have lunch onboard the Constellation. Even though we couldn't get the shuttle scheduled to leave here until 1 p.m., boarding is until 3 p.m., so we are hoping the lunch buffet is open all of that time.

Once we leave the hotel, we will have no internet access for a month! We do plan to buy a four-hour internet package onboard for this first cruise which will give us about 8 minutes each day for each of us to use. Hopefully it will be enough to upload and mail out pictures and maybe scan my emails briefly. I will probably not try to use any of that time for blogging. Sorry loyal bloggers. If anyone who reads this who does NOT currently receive the picture links in an email but would LIKE to have picture links in an email, please email me with that request or leave a comment here. I will be checking this blog and my email one more time today before I pack up the laptop. That should be about 12:30 local San Diego time.

If there is a scale onboard the ship in the spa or the gym, I will be using it and there WILL be a brief report on that. If it's really bad, I'm sure you'll hear the screaming even from the middle of the Pacific Ocean!