On Tuesday, we finally reached the special day that this trip was planned to celebrate – Cathy’s 50th birthday. After our long and hot day at Pearl Harbor the previous day, this would be a calm beach day, with dinner at a great restaurant that night. After a walk...

This is part 2 of our day at Pearl Harbor, which began with about 3½ hours at the USS Arizona Memorial. We would have less than 2 hours to go through the Pacific Aviation Museum, which I knew would not be enough. It had become clear that to see...

The only big day we had planned for Oahu was a visit to Pearl Harbor, which we had booked months ago for the 4 of us. The USS Arizona Memorial was the first priority, next was the Pacific Aviation Museum, and if we had any time left there were...

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...

On Friday night, our ship stayed in the harbour at Lahaina, Maui, allowing me to book an early-morning scuba trip to the island of Lanai for Saturday. Just before 06:00, I boarded a tender to get back ashore from the Celebrity Solstice. The seas were rougher than they had...

On Friday and Saturday, we were in Lahaina, Maui. I had a 5-hour scuba charter booked for Saturday morning, but other than that we had no plans. Seeing the sun rise from the top of Haleakala is one of the must-sees on Maui, but even with our overnight stay,...

On Thursday, we were scheduled to be docked at Kailua-Kona (Kailua Village) from 11:00 am until 8:00 pm, and our plan was to rent a car and just explore Kona district, with a coffee plantation and a historic site being the must-sees. Sunrise off the west coast of the...

For our stop in Hilo on Wednesday, Cathy and I hired a private guide to take us on an all-day tour of Hawai’i Volcanoes National Park. This is a lengthy post, but it was an amazing day, and it took 40 of the 250 photos I shot to share...

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...