Saturday 21 February 2015 Puerto Vallarta

Today we took in the Pirate Land Adventure with Darren and Sue and their boys. We had a pretty long cab ride to the port where we met “Krusty,” our personal pirate. He was to be our attendant for the day. We had a fairly lame breakfast in the hold of the ship. It was a real wooden sailing ship complete with wooden sides and ribs, although it had been fitted with a diesel engine. Later, we were told the ship’s history, although we could not understand a lot of it due to the sound system and the speaker’s accent. I believe that it was built in Spain as a replica of Columbus’ ship the Santa Maria.

Shortly after leaving port at 10:00, there was a bit of a dance party. Later the pirates put on a comical play, featuring a young recruit from Lampman SK, with good guys and bad guys and the audience encouraged to cheer or boo as appropriate. The boys were quite enthralled.

After the play, we were loaded into speedboats for our trip to the beach several minutes away. The much slower pirate ship caught up to us there later. At the beach they served us beer and soft drinks while we took part in various beach and water activities, including a kids treasure hunt.

After a couple of hours we again boarded the speedboats for our trip back to the ship. There we were served the meal we had ordered from a few choices presented when we first arrived on the dock. All of us adults ordered the filet and shrimp. I was not really expecting much, but it was probably the best meal of our trip so far. It was not quite up to the level of a good steak restaurant, but it was very good. The steak was wrapped in bacon and served on top of pasta with nice vegetables and large shrimp on the side.

After the meal we played “Name that tune” until we returned to the dock at about 3:30.

When we arrived back at the hotel we learned that the twins had already been in the pool twice. I joined the Sprungs in the surf for a while, and then we all gathered around the pool. Later we hung out at Laura’s balcony and a few people went to eat. At 8:30 Carla and Tyler, Laura and Brett, and Celeste and I went to the Italian restaurant while Darren, Sue and Sprungs were on baby watch. Cameron fell asleep on Sue’s lap, but Justin stuck it out by watching Nathan play video games.