my friend rhoda had talked to me about how stressful work was and i had my own issues with stress from other things, and we decided that we needed to just take a trip to get away from it all. after much thought, we decided to go to catalina during thanksgiving weekend.
hard part of the whole thing was getting up at 3.00am! of course i was a moron and saw a movie the night before and so i only had two hours of sleep.
along with rhoda and hannah, they brought their friend aleck and her mom. i didn't really think about the ferry ride, but the ride proved to be a bit too much for aleck and hannah. they both got a bit seasick from the ride over. poor hannah was seasick throughout breakfast but she proved to be a tough little girl and she managed to overcome it.
i enjoyed breakfast not because of the food, but because i enjoyed eating at a place where the regulars knew each other and were enjoying breakfast and each other's company. it's simple things like this that really made me have that sense of being away from the big city of LA... even though i don't technically live in LA.
we took two tours, the first one being the submarine ride which was pretty cool. i loved the view of underwater life. the second one was a tour of the island. it was okay, my only issue was that i would have liked to have stopped and had more time at certain spots to take pics. some people were freaked out since most of the drive was on a bumpy rode right next to a cliff... hehe... i've been on worse so this didn't bother me at all. actually on the way down i managed to catch a few zzzs.
managed to take quite a few decent pics though. the great thing about being somewhere knew is that there's all kinds of possibilities. i felt bad for rhoda cos she forgot her camera. i know she has a pretty good eye and it would have been interesting to see catalina through her pics. she did take a couple of pics with my cam though so at least she has some pics of her own.
it got cold much later and damn... we got tired too! i think we regretted the decision to take the 8.50pm ferry instead of the earlier one... with the sun setting so early and the temperature dropping... it really made it seem much later than it really was.
when we finally got on the ferry... we all passed out! i needed that power nap since i had to drive when we got back to long beach.
all in all... a great trip. finally been to catalina, and it was worth the trip. i definitely want to make a return trip and hopefully the flickr group will vote to come here sometime. i'd love to try other things like renting bikes or maybe going kayaking or scuba diving.
funny thing tho, like most of my trips, i come back exhausted! haha... i needed all of saturday and most of sunday to recover from the trip... but still... i had fun and that's all that matters
