Ole? Oh, nay!

By John Olesky (BJ 1969-96)
Paula and I signed up for a cruise to Mexico with stops in Puerto Vallarta, Mazatlan and Cabo San Lucas, all places I’ve never been on my seven previous cruises. Because the swine flu scare centered on Mexico, Princess Cruises took us instead to San Francisco, Santa Barbara and San Diego.

We made the April 28-May 13 journey to help Paula’s parents celebrate the 100th birthday of Paula’s second cousin, Marion, who lives in Monrovia, California. She seems more like a 75-year-old in spirit, mobility and personality.

Since we were going to be in California, we thought that it would be a good time to take a cruise along Mexico’s western shores. Good idea. Terrible timing.

We kept to our original plan for spending three days in Las Vegas. That made Nevada the 41st state that I’ve been in, to go with the 29 countries in my travels since my 1996 retirement from the Beacon Journal.

Las Vegas must use a trillion kilowatts a minute the way it’s lit up. Just like Shanghai, China, which we visited over the 2006/2007 Christmas/New Year’s period. The Bellagio casino/hotel has a fantastic outdoor water show display. Every 15 to 30 minutes the music is choreographed to match the water spurting up to 460 feet high. The lighting makes the display even more spectacular. It cost $40 million to build the lake and install the 1,214 water-emitting devices.

The Golden Nugget has a $1 million golden nugget on display. The Paris Las Vegas casino has a 460-foot replica of the Eiffel Tower. The Venetian has gondola rides under the hotel’s blue-sky canopy. Fremont Street has periodic videos on its canopy that stretches for blocks and envelops the myriad of buildings in the shopping complex. We came across former Cincinnati Reds baseball great Pete Rose selling his autographs (we didn’t buy).

We stayed at The Orleans casino/hotel.

We did gamble in the casinos. We both won money. Paula won $3 and I won $7. We put $1 a day apiece into the machines. We ate steak dinners for $6.99 apiece ($1.99 apiece when we used our free $5 worth of casino money on the dinners).

We took side trips:

-- The massive 1936 Hoover Dam across the Colorado River on the Nevada-Arizona border.
-- Scenic 195,819-acre Red Rock Canyon, five miles west of Las Vegas. We saw petroglyphs by one of the seven Native American cultures that once lived in the area.

As for the cruise, we visited Alcatraz during our San Francisco stop. I did time in “The Hole,” where the baddest of the bad were kept in isolation at the 1934-63 federal prison off San Francisco Bay.

We also visited two Spanish missions:

-- The Old Mission in Santa Barbara, founded in 1786.
-- The San Juan Capistrano Mission, founded in 1776. Its major claim to fame is that cliff swallows fly 6,000 miles from Argentina to arrive each March 19 (St. Joseph’s Day). Sort of like buzzards returning to Hinckley, only the Capistrano birds are much smaller.

In San Diego:

-- We walked around Balboa Park, which has 15 museums, performing arts venues, magnificent gardens and the San Diego Zoo.
-- We visited the Hotel del Coronado, which opened in 1888 as the largest resort hotel in the world and the first to use electrical lighting. Opulence only begins to describe it.
-- From the Rosencrans National Cemetery in Point Loma we could look past the beach and across San Diego Bay and take in the San Diego skyline.
-- We strolled through San Diego’s Old Town, where in 1769 Father Junipero Serra established the first of 21 Spanish missions in California.

What’s next on our list? We’re looking at several possibilities.

If you want to see the photos of our trip, click on the headline.