We are 3 days into our cruise on the MS Balmoral and will dock in Puerta Vallarta tomorrow morning around 7 am, then we go on a tour.

Met Elaine at LA airport and we headed almost immediately for San Diego. Just time for a shower and some breakfast. Our hotel in San Diego was great and we enjoyed a marvellous dinner at a Red Lobster restaurant, with real fresh lobster.

Wednesday we took a drive up the coast as far as Del Mar and enjoyed a browse around a huge antique store.

The Balmoral is a smaller ship with about 1100 passengers, mostly British. Our cabin is large and comfortable and the meals are excellent.

I am currently reading The Grapes of Wrath which details the movement of displaced families from Oklahoma and Arkansas in the 1930's when a drought from 1931 to 1939 devastated the land. The quote below sums up why route 66 is so important and why Peter and I felt the history as we drove it.

" Highway 66 is the main migrant road. 66 - the long concrete path across the country, waving gently up and down on the map, from Mississippi to Bakersfield - over the red lands and the gray lands, twisting up into the mountains, crossing the Divide and down into the bright and terrible desert, and across the desert to the mountains again, and into the rich California valleys

66 is the path of a people in flight, refugees from the dust and shrinking land, from the thunder of tractors and shrinking ownership, from the desert's slow northward invasion, from the twisting winds that howl up from Texas, from the floods that bring richness to the land and steal what little richness there is there. From all of these the people are in flight, and they come to 66 from the tributary side roads, from the wagon tracks and the rutted country roads. 66 is the mother road, the road of flight."

" The people in flight streamed out on 66, sometimes a single car, sometimes a little caravan. All day they rolled s;ow;y along the road, and at night stopped near water. In the day ancient leaky radiators sent up columns of steam, loose connecting rods hammered and pounded. And the men driving the trucks and overloaded cars listened apprehensively. How far between towns? It is a terror between towns. If something breaks- well, if something breaks we camp right here while Jim walks to town and gets a part and walks back and - how much food we got?"

The Grapes of Wrath. John Steinbeck. 1939