Donde esta la polizia?

Feb 1.

The day began well enough, we got to sleep in. The only thing we had scheduled was a tango lesson in the afternoon.

After breakfast, we went to meet Cintia, the travel agent who arranged our BA portion of the trip. We had a very nice chat with her, and presented her with a snowglobe my mom picked up in NY. She collects them, and appreciated it very much. She gave us shopping and lunch recommendations.

We stopped and bought some wine, and then went back to the hotel. We ran into Carol and Eric, two of our cruisemates who live in Morro Bay. We'd met them for lunch in Big Sur a couple of weeks ago. We dropped of the wine, and then went to lunch.

The trip went to hell at the end of lunch. When I went to leave, my purse was gone. With my credit cards and my passport, and some (but not most) of my cash. In a total panic, I ran back to the hotel to see if I had my passport copy, while Glen went to cancel the tango lesson. I didn't. I stopped at the concierge to ask about getting to the embassy, and she said I had to go to the police first and we'd call them embassy when we got back. We went over there, and since I had to wait, I asked Glen to go to the TA's office to call the embassy. Eventually the officer took the report. In the meantime, Glen hadn't come back, so I started walking to Cintia's office. I ran into her and Glen coming to get me. Turns out the Embassy closes at 1:30, so they told me to come back at 8:30 am and it would take an hour or two. We went back to Cintia's office, and using her phone we canceled all the credit cards, and froze my bank account. I needed two passport pictures, so she took me to get them done.

We went back to the hotel after that and packed, because we had to leave the room very early to get to the embassy when they opened.

At about 5:15, we went down to the lobby to preregister for the cruise. I didn't think I could register, but Glen could. We had to change our credit card, so we decided to do that tonight, instead of at the port. Glen was able to do that no problem and the gentleman supervising tried to let me check in, but his boss said no. I expected that, but at least we were able to switch the card.


Tonight was the big group dinner, so at about 7:45 I went down to the lobbly to wait for people. Just before 8 they started arriving, and at about 8:05 about 15 of us took off for the restaurant. I had the google map and directions from Cintia so we started walking. Once we got to the main street we had to walk down, it got fun. One of the men in our group had walked around that area, and said he knew where it was. He had us cross a street a block early and we ended up about 4 blocks overshot. A young lady was walking her dog, and told is it was the nicest neighborhood in BA. We asked where the restaurant was, and she gave us directions back to where were were. Another few blocks and we found the street. The signs were a bit confusing so we walked up the street. The people who claimed to know where it was told us to turn left, off the restaurant's address street. We questioned it but he assured us it really was there. We walked almost a block and then decided ti couldn't be that far off. We headed back and eventually found it.

We were in several tables of 8. Dinner was good, we once again split some items. Our total was just under 50.00 for both.

In discussing walking back. we promised we'd follow the map and it would take a lot less time. It did.

After dinner, bed. We had an early day the next day.