The short cruise I went on ended last Friday, and I’ve got some photos and a drawing of Santa Catalina. Sort of a mini-travelogue, I suppose.

The cruise went to San Diego and Ensenada as well, but for some reason, Santa Catalina ended up being the most photogenic stop.I just had forgotten how pretty it was. I had been twice before when I lived in Southern California, and I only had dim memories of the little town of Avalon sitting crowded and desperately cute tottering on the edge of a cliffy island that looks ready to push it back into the ocean. But then maybe I can be forgiven for having sinister memories — the last time I went to Sta. Catalina, I took the boat over from Newport Beach and was outrageously seasick by the time I got there.

Having this time taken a cruise boat (slogan of cruise boats everywhere: if we encounter a tsunami, it might cause cups to tinkle together during teatime), I stepped onto the dock right as rain and was surprised to see before me just a jewel of a place.

A mite foggy perhaps, but then that might have been a good thing. It was in the 70’s as it was (in early December. sigh. You gotta love that Southern California “winter”.) It was all tidy little shops selling Tommy Bahama everything, little stands selling dried starfishes shaped like everything else and … ice cream shops. Who knows why, but Sta. Catalina probably has more ice cream shops per capita than anywhere else outside of wherever the Oompa-loompas come from. If we had had more time we might have tried to find out which one was best.

But time was in short supply, and so after doing a little shopping I struck out for the “casino”. The casino is the biggest eye-candy in the town of Avalon, a monstrous Art Deco cream-colored building that you can just imagine flappers and zoot-suiters cutting a rug in. And so they did, probably. It was built in 1929 by William Wrigley (one of the chewing gum guys), and it’s never actually been a casino, but it’s been a ballroom, a theater, a museum and a lot of other things. It’s just a Jazz Age bit of swank to dress up the landscape, but it’s also an easy half-mile stroll to get to, just to say you did. Other than the breezy walk, there wasn’t a big payoff for me in getting to the casino, other than nabbing this nifty picture of palm tree shadows that I managed to click in the twelve seconds that the fog burned off.

So that was about it. This was a short cruise that was more about the company than the destinations, so it was just a bit of something extra to reacquaint myself with Santa Catalina and find that it could surprise me a little.