Puerto Vallarta, ay, ay, ay!

After having to skip Cabo San Lucas as Hurricane Paul had stirred up the waters around the cape, we added an extra sea day onto our itinerary. The passengers weren’t too happy, but they understood we could not tender (take a tiny boat from the ship, to the shore) without putting them in peril. We instead did “scenic cruising” which basically taunted them with the beaches in Cabo that they COULDN’T go to that day.

We arrived in Puerto Vallarta at 4:00am, Friday morning, two hours earlier than planned since we had to medically disembark someone straight away. I went to Walmart (yes, there is one in Puerto Vallarta) with some of the staff to find them some Halloween costumes. I had a brainstorm while watching some of our passengers bungle through Walmart in their full-on tourist armour. I’ll wait to explain that one with a picture of Lucy on Halloween. I can’t wait.
From there we did a bit of poking around the downtown flea-market area and haggled and got hassled but I was strong and did not buy a thing. Lucy got taken for some weird piece of Mexican art however. Eric, Lucy and I picked out a not-too-skeezy place to eat on a side street near the beach, enjoyed a Mexican meal and then walked to the beach. Lucy had to work, so Eric convinced me to go to the gay beach with him and there we ran into our Cruise Director, Bobby. The beach was a very nice area and a couple of cold pina coladas and a corona later, we were set. The total lack of beautiful, skinny women was great and there were gorgeous (albeit very shiny and speedo’d) men everywhere so all in all not such a bad idea. Spent the day swimming, drinking, and sunning; then back to the ship for dinner and a nap before starting work.