Category: Cruises

We sailed from Honolulu the evening of October 18th, and arrived in Vancouver early the morning of October 24th. Those 5½ days were similar to the ones on the Astoria-Kauai crossing, but this post will show you events and places I didn’t cover in the one about the westbound...

Spending 2 nights in Honolulu (October 17th and 18th) was a last-minute change to our itinerary that was necessitated by the tragic fires in August that completely destroyed Maui’s cruise port, Lahaina. Our only plan was dinner at a place that’s very special to us, and that’s really all...

On October 16th we were docked at Kailua-Kona (usually just called Kona) from 8:00am until 6:00 pm. Unlike our busy 2014 visit when we rented a car and went to Kona Joe Coffee and Pu’uhonua o Honaunau National Historical Park (see “Exploring Kona, Hawaii“), we had no plans and...

This was the first visit to Kauai for both Cathy and I, and since we booked the cruise I’d been dreaming of doing a bucket-list flight along the Na Pali coast. Cathy booked us with Ali’i Air Tours, in a Robinson R44 with the doors off. She was only...

Imagine living in a small community – 3,600 or so residents – which has great music venues, bars, and restaurants, a spa and many other facilities. Now imagine that in that community, you’re one of the 2,600 people that are retired, and the other 1,000 residents do all the...

I don’t know why it’s done, but as with our Hawaii cruise in 2013, we made a detour to spend a day in Astoria, Oregon. This post isn’t going to tell you much about Astoria, but on the 2013 visit I spent a very busy day exploring – see...

We’re now on Day 8 of this trip, which features a 17-night cruise from Vancouver to Hawaii and back on Holland America’s Koningsdam. Often we book trips at least a year ahead but we just decided about 3 months ago to book this, after a lot of discussion about...

Saturday evening was a busy night for most of the passengers on the Celebrity Solstice, but not in a good way. For about 2,400 of the 2,800, this was our last night on the ship – on Sunday morning we had to disembark. The other 400 would continue to...

We overnighted aboard the Celebrity Solstice in Honolulu Harbor Monday night, and had a car booked from Enterprise for Tuesday morning. The general plan was simply to circle Oahu, or at least the eastern half of it, with stops at whatever spots attracted any of us at the moment....

We’re now about half-way to Hawaii, “the Big Island”, having sailed from Honolulu last night at 8:00 pm. We arrived at Honolulu at noon on Monday after having the islands in sight for several hours. Sailing in is a perspective that not many get, which is a shame, because...