Big City Hunt and Little Island Voyage

We woke up this morning for an early breakfast on the ship at the Promenade Cafe. They had a reasonably priced breakfast buffet providing plenty of variety to satisfy and fill us up. After breakfast, we showed Joe around and shared some of the stories we heard on our tour. We also went into a small lecture hall and watched several videos that shared the oral histories of different people on the Queen Mary. We heard the personal stories of a crew member, a war bride, and a refugee. I always love hearing the stories of real people.

We said farewell to the Queen Mary and moved on to our next stop, the Big City Hunt. Over a year ago, I had purchased an online scavenger hunt for Long Beach. We were given various clues and questions to answer and we did a lot of walking...a lot of walking. We started at the Long Beach Museum of Art and ended up on the harbor by the Aquarium of the Pacific and the Long Beach Harbor Lighthouse. Some of the landmarks were interesting, but when we finished, we had a 2-mile walk back to where we had parked the car. This didn't seem that well planned.

During the hunt, we noticed a large number of motorcyclists around the city. Eventually, we found out why. There was an International Motorcycle Show happening at the Convention Center. The parking lot was filled with hundreds of motorcycles! Once back at our car, we realized we had walked about 5-6 miles. It was a quick drive and we were soon boarding the Catalina Express.

We checked into our hotel, Hotel Mac Crae which is a fourth generation owned hotel. It is old and small, but we are right on the boardwalk in the heart of all of the shops and restaurants and it should make a nice home base for the next two days. We had dinner at Coyote Joe's and Joe and I participated in some lively conversation and debate while we ate. After dinner, we walked through a few shops and then made plans for tomorrow. We have a busy day planned with a jeep tour, a glass bottom boat trip, and a behind the scenes tour of the Casino. As Mater from the movie Cars would say, "It's going to fuh-uhn!"

To read another perspective, you can read David's blog here: http://favoritesonsspiels.blogspot.pe/2017/11/from-queen-mary-to-catalina.html