Crusie ship, ghosts, tsunammi alarm, cheerleading, movie and a wonderful weekend in Long Beach

Ok, that's a pretty long headline

It has been a long and fun weekend and I’ve had time to do a lot of things.

First of all it was the skydiving Friday, that you can read about below here. So amazing, and I’m still in a happy buzz after it.

Almost immediately after I came home from that I had to go again. In a fully loaded car we were headed for Long Beach to celebrate Cecily’s birthday for a couple of days and also see her and Lauren’s cheer competition on the Sunday.

It was an incredible hotel we stayed at. It was the old cruise ship Queen Mary that now operates as a hotel and tourist attraction. She was also used as a troop transportation ship during WWII. The ship looks like the Titanic, but a bit bigger and with only three funnels.

Our hotel!!

Me, David, Lauren and Elyse outside the hotel

The rooms were the old cabins. We had two rooms. Me, Riley and Elyse had one and Cecily, Vaios, Lauren and David one. There room was the Eisenhower cabin. That’s where we spent most of our time during the Friday evening, after our dinner. We had some drinking games, Thumber and had a photo session. There was a certain amount of drinks that went down.

Riley, Cecily and me in the cabin on Friday night

The day after we walked around the ship to then attend a guided tour. It was about how the ship during World War Two transported troops from America to Europe. A total of 800 000 persons, with 16 000 as the most on one single trip, the highest number of people ever travelled on a ship at one time. It was cool to feel the winds of history was present and saw photos of how it was then while you were looking at it right now. And also hear stories of how it was and hear speeches by the old captain and Churchill read by the guide. It was powerful.

Another historic thing is that the ship is said to be haunted. A machinist was crushed to death in the engine rooms, and his moaning can be heard. Also a 7-year-old girl was murdered in the pool room and this has lead to many ghost stories. Several ghost hunters have been there, and this weekend there were some. I wasn’t there, but Cecily and Vaios met them and joined them. They went to the pool room and looked for the girl, Jackie. They didn’t see them with their eyes, but in pictures the ghost hunters took you could see some white light that wasn’t there. In all of their photos. Darn it that I wasn’t around to take photos on my own!

More about the ghosts on the ship you can read here on the section Paranormal in the Wikipedia article for the ship.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RMS_Queen_Mary

Scary hallway. Got me thinking of The Shining.

In the weekend there was an earthquake in Chile and there was a tsunami warning in the entire Pacific Ocean. We were a little worried since we stayed at a ship by the pacific coast but we didn’t think that much about it. Until after the tour was over and we were at our room waiting when we all by a sudden heard in the speaker system:

”Do NOT use the elevators. Use the stairways to evacuate the ship”

And then an alarm went off.

Shit, the tsunami is coming! We thought. We were just to go on a city tour so we were ready to leave and went out in the hall way where the protection doors had closed and people weew heading for the emergency exits. Then the alarms stopped and some crew members told us that is was the fire alarms that has went off but it wasn’t dangers. But we were heading out anyway so we continued.

We went o the town in Long Beach, but it was raining so we had to be indoors. First coffee at Borders and then we went to a shopping mall. Then dinner at an Australian steak house, very nice. Then we finished the day with movie at the hotel.

Today, Sunday, there was a cheerleading competition at CSULB, California State University, Long Beach.  That school had a very cool arena, shaped as a big blue pyramid. It was a whole lot of teams competing in many classes. A lot of small children and high school teams. A cool thing was that they used two Swedish songs. Ace of Bace’s Beautiful Life and also – E-Type! It was Eurofighter. Was really surprised. And happy =)

In SBCC:s group there were six teams. CC were much better than last time and had a new routine that’s they nailed very well. Really good actually, and people were very satisfied.

Therefore they got very disappointed by being just third, which they for some reason did.

I talked to the girls afterwards and they were very disappointed, but I think they will get over it again.

The Arena at CSULB

Of the many stunts the girls performed

It was a fun trip home where me, Lauren and David sat in the back seat and talked about rap songs, Vikings, sexual education and Katy Perry.

Came home to Victoria House where they apparently had been partying too… Then went to the movies to see Cop Out. Don’t have time to write a review now, but it was very, very good. Very funny. It is an action comedy with Bruce Willis and Tracy Morgan. The grade is four baseball cards out of possible five.

It has been a great weekend filled with adventures. Life in California is just so wonderful right now.