San not Francisco

 Ah ha.  Did you think we had gotten lost?  Did you think you were going to find us in San Francisco?  Well not so fast.  It was our last day in LA and we went to the Maritime Museum which was just down the street from our ship past the Battleship Iowa which we visited the day before.  There just wasn’t much else available.  The museum required our vaccination cards for entry.  The museum detailed the history of the LA port area.  The thing that is amazing in this and several other of the museums we have been in is the scale model ships that have been donated to them.  The lengths to which the model makers go to create exact replicas is amazing.  They go to archives to find the original plans, scale them, then spend two to ten years creating the models from scratch.  There are all manner of ships from ancient times through Viking ships, and ships from the age of discovery, think Columbus, to the sailing war ships of the great seafaring nations before steam power, to the steam ships and more modern war ships and merchant marine ships.  The models are spectacular and the years and man hours spent in their construction is humbling.  We returned to the ship after a quick but unsuccessful shopping trip.  Nothing close by and we were planning to use some of our time with our friend Becky in San Francisco to do our shopping.  We arrived back on ship and found a note on our door inviting us to a private function for the people who booked the cruise through our same agency.  We dressed for dinner and then went out to meet the group.  We found a group of four other people on the deck and confirmed that we were in the correct place on deck as several other passengers arrived.  There was clearly no official party at this spot so several people went off to see what they could discover.  It was discovered that the party was supposed to take place in a somewhat different spot and someone from the ship crew finally showed up to let us know.  We went to the lounge and found a sign for our group.  As with all the parties to this point there was free alcohol and then appetizers for our group.  Most of us knew that there was not an actual host from our cruise travel company on board, but we appreciated the chance to meet other folks on the cruise.  There were about a dozen people all told.  No sooner had we sat down than the captain came on the intercom.  This was not shocking until he said we would not be going to San Francisco but would be going to San Diego instead.  This was terribly disappointing for us as we had made plans with Becky for both days in San Fran.  Apparently San Francisco was going to require a negative PCR test to get off the ship.  The test is expensive, takes too long, and the ship was not set up to do it so back to San Diego we went.