U-Dig Fossils

Our latest adventure with RAH... U-Dig Fossils in good old Delta, Utah. While many have heard of Delta, few have ever been there, or know where it is. Trust me, it's in the middle of nowhere and it's not that exciting. Going south on I-15, you turn off at the Nephi exit and continue west. And you keep driving for about 50 miles, turning once on a connecting highway till you hit Delta, a small town with a population of just over 3,000. So we looked around at a museum and a store and ate out and watched the Jazz game that night in the hotel. The next day, we got in the van and drove another 30 miles and then turned off on a rocky bumpy road for 20 miles to get to the U-dig place. This place just has piles and piles of rocks and you go out with your safety glasses, gloves, rock hammer, and bucket and just pound away at rocks looking for trilobites. There are quite a few of them actually. But a lot of times, you open the rock and there is nothing. I found a bunch of little guys, and a couple of larger ones that I gave to the participants. You actually hit the sides of the rocks to open them like a book, rather than breaking the rocks in half on the surface side... does that make sense? After a while, i was having more satisfaction pounding rocks and breaking them apart than finding the fossils. We were there for almost 3 hours and everyone went home with some new fossilized friends.

Me and my safety glasses and rock hammer!

Searching for fossils!

Look closely and you can see some of the imprints on the rocks. About an inch and a half long.

Just some small guys on these rocks. About half an inch long.

Randomness

Well I have random pictures on my camera that I don't know what I would say in a post about them but I think everyone should see them (for no real reason really) and so I've decided it just needs to be a random picture post. So here it is!

Me and Michelle at Christmas in Portland. It was the first picture I took with my new camera.

Alyssa. She looks like she's rising out of the bed or standing behind it or in the middle of it or is being sucked into it... but it's none of those things. We were just sitting and talking and I had to take a picture because her position looked so odd! Care to explain yourself Alyssa?

Towels folded into animals on the cruise ship. They greeted us with mints every night.

Andrea, me, and Kendra. It was an uneventful night in early January before anyone had come back for the semester. Kendra wanted to do a mask and so Andrea and I joined in. We could be in a horror movie... or at least a comical horror movie.

Alyssa's feet. And her laptop. And the top of her head. Our beds are in an L in our room and her bed is raised a bit higher than mine. I was going to sleep one night and this is what I saw from where I was lying down.

Thanksgiving Point animal farm. We took 29 participants here and saw lots of animals. Me and Mr. (or Mrs?) Goat. It looks like a beautiful day but trust me, we froze our tooshies off out there.

The peacocks at the animal farm. I took this picture because I've never seen an all white peacock before. Well, not that I can remember. Maybe I have seen one at West Ed Mall? In any case, the peacocks didn't open up, probably too cold.

Not the animal farm. This is Acapulco, Mexico. An old fridge in the yard with a chicken inside sitting on the eggs... how much more random can it get? The end.

Last Sea Day and LA

This picture is dedicated to Jason because of his comment in my last post... This is what we saw in the water in our glass bottom boat tour. Actually it was kinda silly because it was easier to look at the Mexican piranas over the edge of the boat than through the glass bottom. And really, this is an over the edge of the boat picture. Sorry, I guess I didn't take a picture of the actual glass...

Ok so this picture was actually taken on Acapulco day but for some reason, we didn't take any pictures on our last sea day... Actually there is a reason. We didn't do anything. It was cold and windy outside and so we couldn't play basketball which was on the top deck outside, no one wanted to swim in that kind of weather, and we had explored the boat over and over and over again in previous days. So we basically ate, packed, ate, hung out in our cabins, ate, and watched a show at night. And that was our last sea day experience. The water was pretty rough too, it was tough to walk straight with all that rocking.

For those of you who have been wondering where all these places are that I've told you about, here is a little map. Sorry, it's not the best quality ever.

And if you wanted to know what the fancy restaurant food looks like, I took the liberty of taking a picture of my main entree when we ate at the restaurants.

Row by row, left to right:

Seafood extravaganza. Mahi Mahi on a skewer.

Grilled Salmon. BLT with a fried egg.

Baked Flounder. Seafood Potpouri with Linguine.

Steak Loin with Yorkshire Pudding (yes, that humongo thing!). Chicken Souvlaki Salad.

Vegetable Manicotti.

It was great food but it was nice to get back to LA and have a plain Subway sandwich. Fancy food day after day can get old.

Here's us waiting to check in at the LA airport.

And that is the end of the Mexican Riviera Cruise. I will try to sign up for a picture album account so you can see all the pictures we took on the cruise. By the time I do that, it will probably be old news but oh well!

Cabo San Lucas and the Chocoholics Buffet

We arrived Monday morning at around 8am. I went for a run around the ship on their jogging track as we were pulling into port. So this is me after the run when we were anchored in.

Cabo was a pretty place. The rocks made it cool. I guess it has grown a whole lot in the last few years but I still liked it. This was another place that we had to get to on the tender boats. It was a quick ride to shore, we hopped out and were bombarded by people trying to sell us their tours. Well, we didn't plan on doing anything in Cabo except shop shop shop for souvenirs, but they offered us a glass bottom boat tour for just 8 bucks a person. So we took it and off we went to the marina to hop on our boat. We went on two different boats since our group was so large. We went out to sea and saw some different things - the rocks up close, pelicans, what the boat operator called Mexican pirana (they looked like fun size sharks (teeny guys)), seals, and the open water - not that we hadn't been on open water the last 6 days! Anyway, the entire floor of the boat was not glass, just a small section in the middle of the boat that you could look down into the water. It was neat-o. Probably my favorite shore excursion that we did because it was out in the open, the scenery was great, the weather was lovely, and it was just relaxing.

The marina. Our boat was like a canoe compared to these boats.

Here it is. Our glass bottom boat. That's me on the right side second from the front. I didn't even feel sick on this boat and I hadn't taken any meclizine in over 24 hours!

The sea lions lounging around like a big pile of lard.


One of the sea lions up close and looking like a bronze statue.

After our little boat tour, we went to the large market and shopped till we dropped. We decided to split up into 3 groups, so each staff took 5 people with them. It was still a headache trying to find everything they wanted and bargain bargain bargain! In the end, everyone was happy and stocked up with new hats, shirts, jewlery, and other small souvenirs. Success! We then headed back to the ship for lunch. After lunch, everyone was deciding what to do next and we asked Hope what she wanted to do. She didn't know so we made suggestions: "Would you like to take a nap?" (because most days she would take an afternoon nap). Her response: "What? On a nice day like this?" We were shocked. So we ask: "Well, do you want to swim?" Her response: "What? In the cold?" I laughed. Some of our guys are so funny, always entertaining for some reason or another. However, she did have a point, the pool water was always cold!

Good-bye Cabo as we pulled away from our anchored spot.

That evening at 11pm, they had the chocoholics buffet. A very random event. They had one of the restaurants set up with a very long table of chocolate desserts and all around the room they had chocolate sculptings. It was the only desserts I actually ate on the cruise (besides sherbet a couple of times, but I don't count those) and it really wasn't worth the calories... And it was different then I thought it was going to be. Just a bunch of cakes and squares and mousses and actually it's kind of a turn off when you see all that chocolate together and all you can smell is chocolate. I only sampled a few things and was done. I was kinda hoping for some actual chocolate pieces - you know, like good international chocolate. Oh well.

The chocoholics buffet... There were so many more chocolate desserts.



The chocolate sculptures at the buffet.

Isn't this the cutest picture ever? I love it! Hope and Susie got these moo moos in Cabo.

Next up - our last day at sea and arrival to LA!

Puerto Vallarta and the Tequilla Factory

So on Sunday we arrived in Puerto Vallarta. We had a city tour set up, this time on a bus. It was alright. We went to this church... and I can't remember what it's called but it's a historical site. And when we went there, there was a congregation there and they were performing baptisms... while tourists were coming in and out and taking pictures. Bizarre? That's what I thought. Anyway, we saw some other things in the bus and finally stopped off at the Tequilla Distillary and learned how tequilla is made... It was part of the tour and they had tasting after, but we left before that part and took a look at the farm before the Fiesta began. The Fiesta consisted of food, a drinking competition for the men, a tortilla making competition for the women, and some dancing. It was pretty entertaining.

The church built in the early 1900s sometime.

How to make tequilla - You grow the plants, you fire up and cook the pineapple looking things, then you crush it up. Then you ferment the stuff that comes out and then you put it through the distillary. And then maybe we missed the rest of it when we went out to the farm because someone later told me something about how worms are part of the process... Anyway, I wasn't really paying attention to the tour so you only got the very short and incomplete version of how to make it.

Meeting the animals at the farm.

The Mexican Fiesta.

This guy and his family paint these tiles using thier fingers and a fingernail that he keeps long long long. Those are the tiles he made that day. They only take about 10 minutes to finish. The bottom right painting was my favorite. One of our participants bought it.

We went back to the ship later and celebrated one of our participant's birthday which was that day. Then we went to the show that night which was a magic show which was very entertaining. Stayed tuned to see our last stop in Mexico: Cabo San Lucas!