Catching Up 4: Island Life

Thursday, July 20 - after a day in Disneyland (will get to that - we started and ended California in Disneyland - so I'll do that last), we spent a day on Catalina Island.  Here we learned some lessons, too -

1.  Don't waste money on tourist trap tours.  Save it and rent a golf cart and tootle around on your own for site seeing.  You'll probably have a much more enjoyable time.

2.  Busses don't stop for the pictures you want to take.

3.  Neither do Ferry Boats - but the other options were a little beyond our budget range (i.e. rent a yacht?)

What we missed:
the Wrigley Spearmint Monument
the Botanical Gardens

What we got:
*  To see several schools of dolphins leaping in the ocean on our way over.  We sat on the top out in the very windy open (35 miles an hour can create quite a breeze) on our way back hoping to see them again and get better pictures but all we found was one school who were staying mostly under the surface in the then rougher ocean.

School of dolphins.  It was amazing how calm the ocean was on our way over to the island.

*  An underwater tour of the bay - I was impressed with how large and how quickly the kelp grows.

*  An inland tour of the island - I really wanted to go on this, but it ended up not being quite what I thought it would be.  We did get to see parts of the island most people don't go to, including their buffaloes, but I think I would have enjoyed doing our own tour without a bus full of strangers.  It was nice that the fog finally lifted by the time we went out on tour.




*  Some time to just wander the stores and eat fish and chips on a pier and smell the salt air and enjoy the flavor of the little city.   We came back early, however, when we couldn't find a restaurant that interested us for dinner over there.  Ended up eating at Mimi's next to our hotel that night.  I know, kind of disappointing to go on vacation and only eat at the same places we can drive 15 miles and find here in Utah.

*  I was fascinated with the beautiful tile work - some very dated and some newer.  Everywhere we turned, there were the tiles.  I loved them and took a lot of pictures of them but won't bore you with them here.  But the fountain at the center of the beachfront is a great example:

This appears to me to be one of the older examples of tile work we saw there.

It was a day mostly to ourselves, surrounded almost shoulder to shoulder by a lot of other people trying to get away to their own little island escape.  We enjoyed exploring it.  We enjoyed the time together.  And  I've got very sweet memories of you, little Avalon, tucked away on an island in the sea.   Maybe another time we can return and rent those golf carts.  Until then, sweet dreams ...

For more pictures of our day at Catalina, click HERE.