And a Vacation She Shall Have

So, we went to Santa Catalina Island.

We left Minneapolis via Northwest Air at 11:25am Sunday. We arrived at 1:00pm in LAX airport. We called for the shuttle service and they picked us up in a black Lincoln Town car.

Why is it that when Todd smiles, it looks like he sat on a tack?
Mysteries of the Universe.
This is the ferry we took:

Ferry's have come a long way since I last was on one. Todd had a screwdriver on the way there, and I think I could have ordered a 5 course meal.
While we were leaving the dock, we saw this:

Which is the infamous Queen Mary. I can't tell you how many times I heard the story from my grandfather, Herb, about when he got shipped out of the US to go to war and they packed the boys on this ship. They put so many on there that only half of them could sleep at a time, the others had to hang out on deck. Apparently, everyone in New York knew about them leaving on the boat, except no one told the soldiers. He found out from some bar fly. Nice, huh?
Then, while we were on our way to Catalina, we saw this:

Which was a school of about 100 dolphins. It was so cool!!! They went right by the boat, and swam off into the distance. Way better than our trip back, which was really choppy, and Todd got seasick and threw up. Yummy, I know.The island is very cute, 88% of it is protected by the Conservation Society so the towns are 2 and on opposite ends of the 22 mile long island. Here's what the bigger town of Avalon looks like:

And a close up:

Yes, it looks very European. The town was very clean, I got to run in the morning and watch the sunrise over the ocean and the locals cleaning the streets and picking up the trash. It's a tourist town, all day long, but the rest of the island looks like this:

Yes, those tiny things in the background are bison or buffalo. There's about 125-150 of them on the island...they ship them off to South Dakota when they multipy too much. Some guy brought them over for a movie back in the 20's and decided to leave them there. There's been about 300 movies/television shows shot there, it's been a set for everything from Europe to Australia.

Fascinating, I know!

The ride home was pretty uneventful, unless you count Todd getting seasick on the ferry and throwing up his doughnut and mocha about 3 feet from me into a plastic bag. Mmmmmm, appetizing.

But, it's taken me 3 days to do this one post, so, I'm going to bid you all farewell. By the time 8:30pm rolls around, I'm like the walking dead. Why, you ask? Because I was in my car at 4:58 this morning so I could go to the gym before Todd needed to leave for work.

If I don't start losing this nice roll of fat around my waist soon, I'm gonna cry.