Christmas in Cabo!!!

Today is Christmas and we spent it in Cabo! It was such a fun day! We had to take a tender to the dock in Cabo so that was a little crazy, but we made it onto land! We poked around the little shopping area because we had some time before our cruise. Then we went on a boat ride with Pedro to see the arch. We fed the fish and I seriously have never seen that many fish in one spot ever in my life and they were beautiful! We saw blue tangs, clown fish, Mexican clown fish-- all with such bright colors! And the water is such a beautiful turquoise color! We saw the cave that was in one of the Pirates of the Caribbean movies, the rock that looks like Baja California upsidedown (or a Coyote howling)-- and incidentally it points to where the division is between the Pacific Ocean and the Sea of Cortez, an opening where waves from the Pacific come through to the Sea of Cortez, and of course-- the famous arch of Cabo San Lucas! We got lots of pictures in front of that! We saw Lover's Beach (Sea of Cortez side where the two oceans "kiss", and "Divorce Beach", because the tide from the Pacific is rough and the swimming here is dangerous. There were still lots of people enjoying this beach though. Looking back at the arch from the other side, it looks like a dinosaur drinking water! We really enjoyed this boat ride and Pedro was cute! Very energetic and entertaining! We caught our van and headed inland a little and up the coast to where we were scheduled for horseback riding. We had a nice surprise as it is a nature preserve and got to hold baby sea turtles that had just been born a few hours prior to our arrival!! McKenzie asked if we could hold them, and the guy hesitated a bit, but then went and got some gloves so we all got to hold them!! Such a cool experience. He plans to release them tonight after the sun goes down so all the birds and other prey won't see them as well and they have a better chance of making it! They were so cute and surprisingly strong when they flapped their little front flippers. They are very flexible at this stage and don't have a hard shell yet so they easily fall prey to birds and other predators. Sea turtles also don't have the ability to retract into their shells like land turtles either. We learned a lot from the man that was explaining it all to us. He is a marine biologist and taught us a lot of interesting things! Then we got to go on our tour with the horses and it was so much fun!! The beach on the surrounding area was gorgeous!! Our guide just happened to be from Sedona, AZ!! He was there breaking horses for this tour company. Our horses were really well behaved and we had so much fun riding on the beach together! The weather was cooler and there was a breeze and since it was later in the afternoon, the sun wasn't in our eyes. It worked out so well for us! We were running very late in getting back to the ship and were super worried we weren't going to make it. The guy driving us was speeding to get us there on time! We made it though and with plenty of time to spare because there was a really long line to wait for the tenders to take us back to the ship. We still tipped him well because he really worked hard to get us there on time! We ended up waiting for over an hour in a line that looped around several times! We had fun giggling and reminiscing about our adventures from the day! We really fit a lot in and got to see so many things with so many neat surprises! It was the most different Christmas Day I've ever had, but it was so fun!!