Puerto Vallarta

At home, Dave generally doesn’t let me take care of him when he’s sick – “can I bring you some ___” is usually met with, “no, I’m going to get up soon.” So an upside to his being confined to the cabin is that I can do a little waiting on him. The room service menu is extremely limited so it works better for me to just bring him things from the lido, which I do. He wasn’t feeling very well all day, so we decided to start the process to get him some Paxlovid. We were in port starting around 10, so he could call his doctor and also call our insurance to find out if they would cover the Paxlovid on the ship. The original answer was “probably not”, but Sara M, the person he was talking to, said she’d check.

Meanwhile I had a shore excursion scheduled – whale watching on a zodiac-style boat (open air). I’d talked to the shore excursion office and they’d suggested that I test before the excursion and go if it was negative, so that’s what I did. Funnily enough I wasn’t originally going to go on this excursion – Dave and I were going to go on a spirits tasting tour. But earlier in the cruise I’d decided I’d rather go whale watching and had changed my tour, which worked out well.

So I went to the medical center and persuaded them to do a test, which they did, and it was still negative. So after a quick lunch on the lido for me and a quick trip to the lido to bring food to Dave I headed ashore. The boat was parked pretty close to the ship, so once we’d all signed waivers we headed over there. The tour was run by Puerto Vallarta Adventure company, who ran a most excellent zipline tour that Tim, Dave and I went on when we were here for the Christmas cruise long ago.

They loaded everybody on to the boat by simply having two people standing there pulling people in, and then we all put on life jackets and headed out to sea. The boat was pretty full but I managed to be sitting up at the very front. We’d only been going for 10 minutes or so when someone called out, and I was able to see the blow. We raced over and saw a mom and baby cruising through the water, so they cut the engines and we watched for a while. Eventually the whales dove down and went elsewhere, and so did we.

Here's the problem: this past summer on Cape Cod we went whale watching, and we saw a lot of whales – I mean, a lot. And they were bubble feeding really close to the boats, so it was very, very cool. On this whale watch we saw several whales, but mostly all they did was surface and blow a couple times, then wave their flukes and dive. Everyone else on board was very excited but I was just a little let down. Still, seeing whales is cool, even if it’s just blows and flukes in the distance.

There was one part of the trip that was very cool and wonderful. We went closer to shore and then they turned off the engines so we weren’t making any noise. They had an underwater mic and a speaker, and they turned it on and we could hear the whales. Sometimes they were singing and other times they were communicating (our guide could tell the difference). We all thought maybe it was just a recording but then a boat came by and we could hear its engine from the speaker. We stayed there listening for a while and had a snack of fruit and a cookie and it was pretty magical.

Eventually we got going again, and it became clear that there was a problem with the engine. We ended up heading into their staging area and swapping boats, then zooming back to our pier. We got splashed a lot as the boat crashed through the waves, which was also very fun.

I grabbed some drinks on my way up to the room and we had a quiet afternoon and evening in the cabin. Two good things happened: Sara M managed to get Dave's need for Paxlovid classified as an emergency, which means it will be covered by insurance, and the ship's doctor finally called and checked that Dave could safely take the Paxlovid, which arrived shortly after the phone call. 

Dave took this of me. I'm in the very front.

I took this picture of Dave. He's in the middle.