Notes from Feb, 14th embarkation day

The day started beautiful in downtown Long Beach. I got out for my walk. I was crisp and clear and there was no sign of the drenching rain that we left in Bakersfield on the way down the Friday night before.

I had a great walk to the beach area. I still remember Long Beach as the Grand Prix site with its race cars creaming down the city streets (well almost). It is now a city of amazaing culture mix in the downtown. Many signs of eithipian and other African conclaves are on the street. We were staying on Atlantic which is a major street connecting the downtown urban areas with the hilly foothill ocean plateau that surrounds the beachfront. Around old churches of the major denominations were the places were store owners had set up storefronts to produce and customize African attire. There were no gangs out on Saturday morning but it was a very decent hike to get a Starbucks.

Our ship had docked in San Pedro which was a decent distance away but reachable via the Terminal Island bridge. before we got on, we had other items to get that we forgot. Heather was interesting in reading War and Peace,since she had finished Crime and Punishment. Sue was after some electrical tape to tape up the arm of her powerchair. So off we went with sometimes dubious help of the Iphone's gps system to find a Barnes and Noble and a Lowes or Home depot. We found them both and Heather and Lizi both learned to use their GPs or the Apple equivalent to track these stores down. It was a little more difficult that I would have thought since we were looking for these stores in an area similar to Carmel or Santa Cruz. Long Beach has a number of stores and tourists feeds that sit just off the beach and offer and ton of fancy restaurants, pizza places and specialty stores. Not exactly what we needed for these items. So we ended up driving up on the next tier of ocean plateau to more residental middle class areas. We found them and even had a go through the local CVS pharamacy.

We eventually worked through the busy part of Long Beach with all the beach traffic and back up through the town and found the proper connector to the Terminal Island bridge. We traveled on the elevated Terminal Island elevated and dropped down to the San Pedro (Port of Los Angeles) where we dropped people off and unloaded the powerchair and parked the car. They are always gracious to get you on board. This cruise lines meets you with a glass of champagne (free) or orange juice. This is a very classy way to take away the anxiety of the embarkation. You may read the previous entry to get a clue about what happened after we got on ship. Sue asked me about the location of my Ipod and the series of events that transpired after that were a bit frenic.