Steve and Cathy's Blog

We arrive at Berth 93 of the Los Angeles World Cruise Terminal before we awakened at 5:45am. Today 400+ passengers will disembark and another 400+ will board.  The segment just completed went from Papeete, Tahiti in French Polynesia to LA and covered a total of 5,580 nautical miles.  By the way, a nautical mile is 1.1508 statute miles, so on land, this journey would have been measured as 6,622 miles.

Today we have a very special excursion, Kristen Kittscher’s Los Angeles. Cathy has been arranging this with our guide for several days.  From what we have heard, we have a great day in store for us.

Seriously, we will spend today with “Cousin Kristen,” who is actually Cathy’s first cousin once removed, or more easily explained as the daughter of Cathy’s late cousin Gary Fiedler and his wife Joanne.  Kristen and her husband Kai live in Pasadena, and she is one of our very most loved people in our family.  We first got to know her when she was a student at Choate Rosemary Hall School, and we are delighted to have the opportunity to see her today.

She is scheduled to pick us up at 11:00am, because we have some luggage details to attend to first. We will have to clear customs with these four suitcases and then turn them over to a company called Luggage Free that will arrange transportation for them to Wallingford.  We have been given Oceania Cruises tags labeled Yellow 1 and must wait until those luggage tags are called to commence this process. Since we are not disembarking but are “in transit” (i.e., boarding later to continue our journey), we need to wait.

Around 9am, we are able to go ashore.  We need to go through Immigration first, pick up our stuff, and then US Customs to declare all the stuff we bought on the trip.  There will be paperwork to fill out for customs.  We have no idea how long this will take, so have left plenty of time so Kristen doesn’t have to wait around.

Immigration consists of an official saying “You are all set.”  We are then told that we are done with US Customs, and we have never even seen anyone from there, nor have we filled out any customs declarations.  In less than five minutes we are done!  We go hunt down our luggage.  There is a slight snafu as another passenger mistakenly took one of our bags. Fortunately, Luggage Free is on the ball and straightens that out.  We are now outside with our bags (with a porter’s assistance).  The mixup with one of our bags has put us on alert, and Cathy goes into OS and D mode and notices that the FedEx airbills do not have SCOW’s street address.  The guys help us remove the airbills from the pouches, add the street address and put them back.

It’s only 9:45am.  For some reason we will never understand, we now having texting capability even though our phone service is suspended until June 29^th.  We text Kristen, who answers back that she hopes to arrive by 10:45.  We cannot go back into the cruise terminal as it is closed until 10:30 when the next batch of passengers start arriving to board Insignia.  It’s a pleasant day so we just sit and wait.

Kristen pulls up.  After enthusiastic hugs and greetings all the way around, we jump into her car and off we go.  She has suggested that we drive along the Pacific coast through Rancho Palos Verdes where she lived (two different times) when she was a kid.  It’s a beautiful area and we are curious to see it.

It takes a half hour or so to get there.  One of the roads we travel is all beat to death and in pretty bad shape.  Our guide explains that there continue to be mudslides in the area and the highway department can’t keep up with the necessary repairs.  The views are quite spectacular, and so, LA being LA, people have built houses right on the edge of the hills.  At some point in the future, some of these houses will eventually slide down the hill on to this road.

Our first objective is … lunch.  Kristen has picked out Ralph’s Terranea Restaurant located in the Terranea Resort. This resort complex has an interesting history.  Back when Kristen was living in Rancho Palos Verdes, this area was the Marineland Aquatic Park. It went broke and it was decades before the property was sold due to some very tight land use restrictions. Some of these land use restrictions still exist.  This resort is private, but the public is guaranteed access to certain parking lots, to the restaurant and the shoreline.  The resort has been very sneaky in their compliance, however, as the signs for the public parking and for the restaurant are about 10 inches square with very small printing. If you did not know it was a public place, you certainly wouldn’t know by the signage. There is also a restriction on how long owners can occupy their condo annually, as the city does not want permanent residents in this resort.

We find a parking space and head toward the shore.  Beautiful views, bright California sunshine, nice cool breeze, very peaceful and quiet, lots of flowers blooming and birds signing.

We spend some time on a path hoping it will eventually lead us to the restaurant.  It does.  We are seated right away and have a delicious meal, all fish: Cathy had tuna poke, Steve fish and chips, and Kristen grilled salmon and asparagus, after which we find our way to the five-star hotel, past some very interesting plantings, where we sit outdoors, Kristen has a glass of wine and we continue having our conversation.  She is such an interesting person.  It’s nice to relax on land where nothing is moving.

After a while, we decide it’s time to see where she used to live.  First we go to one of the schools she attended, look down on what was a public swimming pool  (now private) where she spent many hours, and check out Redondo Beach.  Then we drive through her old neighborhood as she tells us how she would get around by bicycle, what paths she would take to get around.  It was very fun to hear her reminisce.

Our next objective is a Walgreens drug store so Steve can refill a prescription and Cathy can buy a couple of things.  We are on our way to Redondo Beach when we spot one.  It takes about a half an hour to get the prescription filled, then we are on our way to our last stop: Redondo Beach Pier; another place frequented by Kristen lo these many years ago.  We are able to look back and see where we had been for lunch, and Kristen is happy to find that, though the pier area has been extensively renovated (including adding a parking garage), it is still pretty funky.

It’s right around 5:00pm by now.  Our goal is to have dinner somewhere and then be back at the cruise terminal around 7-7:30pm. We spot a restaurant that looks very intriguing and old and funky – Old Tony’s, aka Tony’s on the Pier.  We each get the Early Bird Special consisting of steak kabobs with linguine with clam sauce.  More than enough.  Again we are reminded of how reasonable and manageable the portions are on the ship and how huge they are in the good old USA! In fact, we all contribute to Mabel’s dinner (Mabel is Kristen and Kai’s 9-year old dog).  On our way out, we look over all the photographs of celebrities that have dined there, some going way back in to the 1950s.

Well, it’s time to head back.  Traffic shouldn’t be an issue, but you never know with Los Angeles.  It actually is not an issue and we are back to the ship in plenty of time for the 9:00pm departure.

And we have tomorrow to look forward to, when we will be in San Diego and again spend time with Kristen, but have the added pleasure of visiting with her husband Kai and her mother Joanne!

Having had the opportunity to spend the day with family, we now begin to be ready for our 180-day odyssey to conclude.  We want to see familiar places.  We want to see familiar faces.  Two weeks to go.  It is time to go home.