San Diego Adventure

The third port on my Coastal California Cruise was San Diego. This is the view from my balcony that morning just before we pulled in to the San Diego harbor to dock. Beautiful sunrise on the rocky cliffs.

I booked a harbor cruise for my shore excursion. It was a nice, relaxing tour around the harbor. The tour was a 1/2 day adventure and I got back to the ship in time for the daily afternoon tea and then dinner at one of the specialty restaurants – Crab Shack – to have an incredible mixed steamer pot with all kinds of seafood!

Here are some of the highlights from my harbor cruise:

This was the boat we took for the tour

This is the boat I WISHED we took for the tour!!!

This is the main bridge over the harbor – we passed under it twice!

We saw lots of other ships – like this one of several turned into historical monuments and/or museums

And the USS Midway Museum

The views were pretty and sometimes odd

The guide told us this was some special house, so I took a photo — but, I can’t for the life of me remember what he said! 🙂

No idea what this was…..but it looked odd, so I took a photo of it! 🙂

Another odd, but cool sculpture of Lord knows what! 🙂

San Diego is home to major Coast Guard and Naval bases and shipyards

Yes, I’m pretty sure that is a BIG gun on the front of that Coast Guard boat…..the tour guide made a joke about getting pulled over for speeding the last time he was out and was hoping they weren’t after him, again! 🙂

The rope fencing around this ship is called “asset protection” and is there to keep people a specified distance from US Naval vessels docked in areas that may otherwise be more easily accessed than other military docks

And there were bunches of people out enjoying the gorgeous day – boating, fishing, etc.

It must be an unwritten law that when you pass another vessel with friendly people onboard, you wave and cheer!

Big boat sailing off into the haze

This pelican was waiting and hoping that fisherman would share his bounty with him! 🙂

And, then there were the critters….you know I love it when I get to see critters!!!

Sea Lions sure are lazy – they will get up on anything to sun themselves! 🙂

And, this was the biggest thrill of all!!! We came up on a small boat with a dolphin beside it — the tour guide told us that they were dolphin trainers and they train the dolphins to identify underwater mines and other things. Our guide asked the trainers to tell the dolphin to jump – they gave the jump command and we were the recipients of a wonderful treat!!!

Pretty darned cool, huh???

When the tour was over and we were pulling back into the dock, we had a great view of our cruise ship (the one in the foreground) and another Princess cruise ship that was also in port that day!

It was another gorgeous California day……

This is the last of the cruise photos/posts. The next posts will focus on the second week of my vacation – San Francisco, the train ride, and Seattle.

The last port on the cruise was Ensenada, Mexico and I didn’t get off the ship, so no photos of that port. I did take this selfie of me soaking up the sun pool side on the Lido deck, instead of going ashore: