Ensenada Cruise

To celebrate Brea's upcoming nuptials, a few of us took a 3 day cruise to Ensenada. Despite all my travel in recent years, I haven't been to Mexico since junior high and I have never been on a cruise. I had only been back in the US a few days, but I was over NZ jet lag and ready to party when we departed on Friday afternoon from Long Beach, CA.

Our ship was the Paradise on the Carnival fleet. Interestingly, Carnival is the only cruise line on the west coast that offers cruises less than 7 days, so our choice was easy. There were three of us sharing one cabin, but we had much more room than I had anticipated. The overall cruise experience was excellent, and it is so nice to know that everything from food to shows is already paid for.

I think we had some of the most fun at meal times, ordering two starters, two mains, and two desserts - each! The meal highlight was on Saturday night, the ship's formal night. Lobster? Prime Rib? Both! And they paired well with the Cabernet Sauvignon we had brought on board. Apparently, for only a $10 corkage fee at the time of opening, you can bring one 750ml bottle of wine per person on board. I had a lot of fun shopping for and choosing our three wines and we all enjoyed them over the course of the weekend.

We spent most of our evenings going to the late dining seating at 8:15; going to watch the evening's show around 10pm, usually a musical production montage: watching the evening's comedy show and/or karaoke afterwards, and then going to the club around 12 onwards....I had no idea our evenings would be so easily filled with activities, and because of the (what I assume is) "international waters" liquor license, alcohol was served very, very late. From personal experience, I would say at least until 4am.


Being a bachelorette party, we got the attention of bachelor parties on board and made several boat friends from the groups. It was fun to have other groups to chat with at the club or sit with at the shows, and now we have some great stories and inside jokes about the more interesting characters.

A big surprise from the trip was the day long excursion we chose to do in Ensenada. You might think of Mexico and assume we went to the beach, maybe even went to a Tequila tasting. When you think of Mexico, you probably don't think of this: wine tasting! I will post an entry about this on my resurrected wine blog in the next week, but for now I will just say that we were pleasantly surprised at the quantity and quality of the wine produced in the Ensenada region. Who knew?!

Another fun aspect was enjoying one of our gifts to Brea - a scrapbook of letters from friends about their favourite memories of Brea and/or marriage advice. Lyndi, our third musketeer on the cruise, did a fantastic job putting the book together, and each night, Brea got to read through a few more entries.

We had such a fun time enjoying the cruise, each other's company, and the towels in the shape of animals in our room each night! I look forward to seeing Brea again in just a few weeks in Boston and to get more involved in all the wedding prep!