Category: Cruises

As I start writing this, it’s 05:20, about 90 minutes before sunrise. I’m on the back deck of the Celebrity Solstice, 8½ hours out of Honolulu, and it’s about 82°F. As usual, only a handful of other passengers are up and about, but crew members are seen often, cleaning...

One of the first questions asked by people who haven’t been on a cruise is often “what do you do on the ship?”. That’s particularly true on an itinerary such as we’re on, which starts with 5 days at sea between Vancouver and Honolulu. The short answer is that...

When I closed the blog on Tuesday morning, a glorious sunrise had just started the day. As I write this, we’re out in the Pacific Ocean a few hours southwest of Vancouver Island. It’s dark (06:00) and the seas are heavy – there will certainly be some sick people...

We spent a second day at sea on Sunday the 22nd, our final full day on the Norwegian Sun. I haven’t said much about the ship yet, and I’m going to skip past this sea day now. When I get home I’ll write up a full review of the...

I’m now way behind in my posts – we’ve been in Santa Barbara for a couple of days. Saturday the 21st was our scheduled day in San Francisco, when we would meet Cathy and her girlfriends for lunch. The original cruise we’d booked, on the Celebrity Millennium, overnighted in...

Astoria was the port I was really looking forward to on this cruise on the Norwegian Sun I may have passed through briefly during a drive a few decades ago, but had never had a good look at the community. A couple of history-oriented friends in Whitehorse like it,...

It’s Wednesday night as I start writing this – 9:40 pm and we’re in the open ocean off Cape Flattery with low rollers. Some passengers are apparently feeling the effects, and I saw a large crew cleaning up a mess on Deck 12 a few minutes ago. It takes...

I don’t shoot much video, but did shoot a half-dozen during the trip, of things that still photos don’t do justice to. Here are the 3 musical ones: First, a machine that actuals plays several violins, from the collection at Siegfried’s Mechanisches Musikkabinett (Siegfried’s Mechanical Musical Instrument Museum) at...

On Sunday morning, we had to leave the River Queen, and we had set a 10:00 am pickup for a taxi to take us to the Hotel Pulitzer for two nights. We were talking to the Hotel Manager on the River Queen as we were saying our last good-byes,...

We’re nearing the end of our cruise on the River Queen – a fact that most are trying to ignore. On Saturday, I woke up at 03:20 am and looked out our stateroom window just as we were passing under a huge bridge in a large city. Although I...