The Last Post

Don’t blame me, the title was Gail’s idea. It will likely be the final post of this trip. In summary, it was the coolest and roughest Pacific crossing ever. Three out of four days in Hawaii were great, only the storm on our second day on the islands caused problems. We skipped the port of Kauai, the Captain opting to wait out the storm in Honolulu. As it turned out the weather was bad on all the islands that day.

It was still a lovely way to enjoy the holidays. The food was good as was the entertainment. We encountered quite a few passengers with whom we knew from previous Christmas cruises. Dancing was good, musically, and better when the floor was staying in one place. It turns out that roller coaster dancing is not so easy.

The disembarkation went smoothly and we were off of the ship, with luggage and on board the bus for our transfer to LAX by 8:15 AM. We arrived at LAX Terminal 2 about 9:00 AM. There was no-one at the Westjet check-in counter and we were not charged for our checked bags. I did not challenge that decision. LAX is under construction, again, and what airport is not? After the check-in process in Terminal 2 we were directed to our boarding gate in Terminal 3. It was not a long trek although we did have to walk outside to pass the construction zone.

Now all we can do is wait. Hope the weather is favourable or our return.

Edith Wharton

One of the great things about travel is that you find out how many good, kind people there are.

Carl Sagan

I don’t know where I am going, but I’m on my way.

A.A. Milne, Winnie the Pooh

As soon as I saw you, I knew an adventure was about to happen.

Mary Ritter Beard

Certainly, travel is more than the seeing of sights; it is a change that goes on, deep and permanent, in the ideas of living.

Anthony Bourdain

It seems that the more places I see and experience, the bigger I realize the world to be. The more I become aware of, the more I realize how relatively little I know of it, how many places I have still to go, how much more there is to learn.

Shirley MacLaine

The more I traveled, the more I realized that fear makes strangers of people who should be friends.

Samuel Johnson

The use of traveling is to regulate imagination by reality, and instead of thinking how things may be, see them as they are.

Rick Steves

Travel is rich with learning opportunities, and the ultimate souvenir is a broader perspective.

Paul Theroux

Tourists don’t know where they’ve been, travelers don’t know where they’re going.

George Carlin

Kilometers are shorter than miles. Save gas and take your next trip in kilometers.

Mark Twain

Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all of one’s lifetime.

Robert Louis Stevenson

There are no foreign lands. It is the traveler only who is foreign.

Oliver Wendell Holmes

A mind that is stretched by a new experience can never go back to its old dimensions.

Susan Sontag

I haven’t been everywhere, but it’s on my list.

Aldous Huxle

To travel is to discover that everyone is wrong about other countries.

Michael Palin

Once the travel bug bites there is no known antidote, and I know that I shall be happily infected until the end of my life.

Bill Bryson

I love the feeling of being anonymous in a city I’ve never been before.

Matthew Karsten

Investment in travel is an investment in yourself.

Ray Bradbury

See the world. It’s more fantastic than any dream.

Mark Twain

One must travel to learn.

Emile Zola

Nothing develops intelligence like travel.

Augustine of Hippo

The world is a book and those who do not travel read only one page.

Terry Pratchett, A Hat Full of Sky

Why do you go away? So that you can come back. So that you can see the place you came from with new eyes and extra colors. And the people there see you differently, too. Coming back to where you started is not the same as never leaving

Anita Desai

Wherever you go becomes a part of you somehow.

Mark Twain, The Innocents Abroad/Roughing It

Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow- mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one’s lifetime.

Mark Twain, The Innocents Abroad/Roughing It

I travel not to go anywhere, but to go. I travel for travel’s sake. The great affair is to move.”

Lao Tzu

A good traveler has no fixed plans and is not intent on arriving.

Robert Louis Stevenson, Travels with a Donkey in the Cevennes

I travel not to go anywhere, but to go. I travel for travel’s sake. The great affair is to move.

Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness

It is good to have an end to journey toward; but it is the journey that matters, in the end.

Marcel Proust

The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.

Jalaluddin Mevlana Rumi

Travel brings power and love back into your life.

David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas

Travel far enough, you meet yourself.

G.K. Chesterton

The traveler sees what he sees. The tourist sees what he has come to see.

Mark Twain, Tom Sawyer Abroad

I have found out that there ain’t no surer way to find out whether you like people or hate them than to travel with them.

J.R.R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring

All that is gold does not glitter, Not all those who wander are lost.

Ralph Waldo Emerson, Emerson’s Essays

Though we travel the world over to find the beautiful, we must carry it with us, or we find it not.

Gustave Flaubert

Travel makes one modest. You see what a tiny place you occupy in the world.

Mary Anne Radmacher

I am not the same having seen the moon shine on the other side of the world.

Neil Gaiman, The Graveyard Book

Wherever you go, you take yourself with you.

David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas

…there ain’t no journey what don’t change you some.

Gustave Flaubert, Flaubert in Egypt: A Sensibility on Tour

It is always sad to leave a place to which one knows one will never return. Such are the melancolies du voyage: perhaps they are one of the most rewarding things about traveling.

Joe Abercrombie, Last Argument of Kings

Travel brings wisdom only to the wise. It renders the ignorant more ignorant than ever.

Paul Theroux

Travel is glamorous only in retrospect.

Lin Yutang

No one realizes how beautiful it is to travel until he comes home and rests his head on his old, familiar pillow.

Horace, The Odes of Horace

Caelum non animum mutant qui trans mare currunt.
(They change their sky, not their soul, who rush across the sea.)

Roberto Bolaño, 2666

Every hundred feet the world changes.

Erma Bombeck

Did you ever notice that the first piece of luggage on the carousel never belongs to anyone?

Roseanne Barr

Men read maps better than women because only men can understand the concept of an inch equaling a hundred miles.

J.A. Redmerski, The Edge of Never

I wonder if the ocean smells different on the other side of the world.”

Winna Efendi, The Journeys

Most of the time, beauty lies in the simplest of things.

Paolo Coehlo

This wasn’t a strange place; it was a new one.

Vera Nazarian, The Perpetual Calendar of Inspiration

Whenever you go on a trip to visit foreign lands or distant places, remember that they are all someone’s home and backyard.

Terry Pratchett, The Light Fantastic

You haven’t really been anywhere until you’ve got back home.

James Russell Lowell

A wise man travels to discover himself.

Ivan Doig, This House of Sky: Landscapes of a Western Mind

There is more time than there is expanse of the world and so any voyage at last will end.

Maya Angelou, Wouldn’t Take Nothing for My Journey Now

Perhaps travel cannot prevent bigotry, but by demonstrating that all peoples cry, laugh, eat, worry, and die, it can introduce the idea that if we try and understand each other, we may even become friends.

Anthony T.Hincks

I’m here, and now, so are you.

Maarten Schafer, Around The World in 80 Brands

Quite some years ago, I started traveling the planet. I thought this would teach me something about the world we live in. I was wrong… It taught me something about myself. It changed me. And nothing will ever again be black-and-white again.

Jane Wilson- Howarth

A traveller with an open mind grows richer with each journey, with each encounter, with each conversation.

M.B. Dallocchio, The Desert Warrior

Travel can sometimes push us to lose ourselves and find ourselves at once. The shedding of old prejudices, dead skin, and the opening of one’s eyes is far better than what any mainstream news outlet could ever tell you.

Melody Lee, Moon Gypsy

I may be lost, but I’m traveling the right way.

Barnaby Allen, Pacific Viking

A port arrival makes you feel so free …To realize what it is to be a free man, with a world before him.

Rachel Wolchin

If we were meant to stay in one place, we would have roots instead of feet.

Anonymous

Travel with the wit of an adult, and the wonder of a child.

Ibn Battuta, The Travels of Ibn Battutah

Traveling leaves you speechless, then turns you into a storyteller.

Lailah Gifty Akita

It is never too late to take another voyage.

Marty Rubin

The secret to being a good traveler is liking a place before you get there.

Charlotte Eriksson, Empty Roads & Broken Bottles; in search for The Great Perhaps

There’s something about arriving in new cities, wandering empty streets with no destination. I will never lose the love for the arriving, but I’m born to leave.

Pat Conroy

Once you have traveled, the voyage never ends, but is played out over and over again in the quietest chambers. The mind can never break off from the journey.

Pico Iyer

We travel, initially, to lose ourselves; and we travel, next to find ourselves. We travel to open our hearts and eyes and learn more about the world than our newspapers will accommodate. We travel to bring what little we can, in our ignorance and knowledge, to those parts of the globe whose riches are differently dispersed. And we travel, in essence, to become young fools again- to slow time down and get taken in, and fall in love once more.

Audrey Niffenegger, Her Fearful Symmetry

There are several ways toreact to being lost. One is to panic: this was usually Valentina’s first impulse. Another is to abandon yourself to lostness, to allow the fact that you’ve misplaced yourself to change the way you experience the world.

Jawaharlal Nehru

We live in a wonderful world that is full of beauty, charm and adventure. There is no end to the adventures we can have if only we seek them with our eyes open.

Colum McCann, Let the Great World Spin

There’s a part of me that thinks perhaps we go on existing in a place even after we’ve left it.

Josh Gates, Destination Truth: Memoirs of a Monster Hunter

Travel does not exist without home….If we never return to the place we started, we would just be wandering, lost. Home is a reflecting surface, a place to measure our growth and enrich us after being infused with the outside world.

Paul Theroux, The Tao of Travel: Enlightenments from Lives on the Road

The wish to travel seems to me characteristically human: the desire to move, to satisfy your curiosity or ease your fears, to change the circumstances of your life, to be a stranger, to make a friend, to experience an exotic landscape, to risk the unknown.

Thornton Wilder, Our Town

Only it seems to me that once in your life before you die you ought to see a country where they don’t talk in English and don’t even want to.

Erol Ozan

You can’t understand a city without using its public transportation system.

Clifton Fadiman

When you travel, remember that a foreign country is not designed to make you comfortable. It is designed to make its own people comfortable.

Jennifer Lee

Be fearless in the pursuit of what sets your soul on fire.

Hans Christian Andersen

To Travel is to Live.

Wallace Stevens

The most beautiful in the world is, of course, the world itself.

T.S. Eliot

The journey not the arrival matters.

Randy Komisar

And then there is the most dangerous risk of all — the risk of spending your life not doing what you want Lawrence Block on the bet you can buy yourself the freedom to do it later.

Henry Miller

One’s destination is never a place, but a new way of seeing things.

James Michener

If you reject the food, ignore the customs, fear the religion and avoid the people, you might better stay home.

Thomas Fuller

Travel makes a wise man better but a fool worse.

Martin Buber

All journeys have secret destinations of which the traveler is unaware.

Lawrence Block

Our happiest moments as tourists always seem to come when we stumble upon one thing while in pursuit of something else.

Andre Gide

Man cannot discover new oceans unless he has the courage to lose sight of the shore.

Mark Twain

Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn’t do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover.

Chief Seattle

Take only memories, leave only footprints.

Henry Rollins

A great way to learn about your country is to leave it.

Herman Melville

It is not down in any map; true places never are.

Eugene Fodor

You don’t have to be rich to travel well.

Eric Weiner

Conventional wisdom tells us… we take our baggage with us. I’m not so sure. Travel, at its best, transforms us in ways that aren’t always apparent until we’re back home. Sometimes we do leave our baggage behind, or, even better, it’s misrouted to Cleveland and is never heard from again.

Mark Jenkins

Adventure is a path. Real adventure – self- determined, self-motivated, often risky – forces you to have firsthand encounters with the world. Theworld the way it is, not the way you imagine it. Your body will collide with the earth and you will bear witness. In this way you will be compelled to grapple with the limitless kindness and bottomless cruelty of humankind – and perhaps realize that you yourself are capable of both. This will change you. Nothing will ever again be black-and- white.

Arthur Frommer

At its best, travel should challenge our preconceptions and most cherished views, cause us to rethink our assumptions, shake us a bit, make us broader minded and more understanding.

John A. Shedd

A ship in a harbor is safe, but it not what ships are build for.

J.R.R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring

Not all those who wander are lost.

Douglas Adams, The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul

It can hardly be a coincidence that no language on earth has ever produced the expression, ‘As pretty as an airport.

Hilo then back at sea

It has been several days since the last posting. The internet has been spotty and too unreliable to even get much in the way of email much less upload a post or photos. Perhaps things will improve while we are at our berth in Ensenada.

Since leaving Hilo the weather has been overcast and grey. The seas have been heavy, the wind has been strong and the outside decks have been closed. Although the ship has handled the rough seas quite well, the decks have been in continuous motion. Walking from port to starboard the trip may involve both uphill and downhill sections. People walk the length of the deck look like they have consumed way too much alcohol, weaving from side to side. The elevators sway and make strange clunking sounds.

However, today, our last sea day before the port of Ensenada, Mexico is bright and sunny. The open decks are once again available for us to walk outside.

Hilo greeted us with a warm sunny day although somewhat overcast. We spent the day just enjoying the warmth that has been uncharacteristically missing this trip. The ship was quite empty with most passengers taking advantage of the last island port.

Among the decorations around the ship are a number of wreaths constructed by various departments. Each department seams to have attempted to use an appropriate motif. Eventualy, there will be photos.

When we departed Hilo for the five day return to continental North America with a stop at Ensenada, Mexico. On the first evening we indulged in the Crown Grill steakhouse thanks to a gift certificate from our travel agent Laurie. It was also a formal night but the floors were too bouncy for much dancing. 

New Years eve was another formal evening. We managed to dance a little. I think the floor was still moving too much but perhaps we are becoming accustomed to the motion.

Honolulu Day 2 and Maui

The weather on this 2019 Christmas day in Honolulu, Hawaii is overcast and drizzly with mist covering the hills down to the sea. The winds are strong. Strong enough that the ship’s lateral thrusters are being used to hold the ship on the berth and reduce the strain on mooring lines. Out beyond the breakwater waves are rolling ashore relentlessly, probably making west coast surfers overjoyed.

Everyone with whom I have spoken seems to have taken a positive view of the Captain’s decision to skip the Kauai call. I have been to the Port at Nawiliwili numerous times and the entry is difficult under good weather conditions. The harbour entry is narrow requiring a slow right turn into the breakwater opening followed immediately by a left turn and complex rotation of the ship to the berth. It would be nearly impossible to execute in high winds. This is compounded by the fact that the harbour can only be used during daylight hours. Honolulu is a much more desirable place to be marooned.

We spent our first morning in Honolulu by taking the free shuttle to Hilo Hatties at the Ala Moana centre. There was a half hearted search for a muumuu, which failed, followed by a quick trip to the nearby Walmart to pickup our first supply of macadamias and a few other items of opportunity. In past years only the shell lei provided on arrival at the centre was the only credential required to take the return shuttle. This time the lei was required to obtain a return trip ticket from the Hilo Hatties cashier. This assures that everyone actually visits the shop.

Our afternoon found us walking, for about an hour, to the Foster Botanical Garden where we walked for another hour or so. The majority of blooms were done for the season except for the conservatory greenhouse. There were, however, many species of shrubs and trees that aren’t seen in our home region.There were still a number of butterflies in one area of the garden and I managed to get one to pose briefly. Caterpillars were busy gorging on leaves in hopes of becoming butterflies someday. A tiny gecko also posed for us before we left the garden. During a stop at the gift shop we met a local couple and chatted for a while. We have always found locals very friendly. Upon learning that we planned to return to the ship by taxi the couple, Linn and Faye, offered to take us back the pier. I guess strangers are just friends you haven’t yet met.

We sailed on schedule, 17:00, after our extended stay in Honolulu as skies cleared and seas calmed. This morning found us in Maui harbour under sunny skies and nearly calm seas. We joined passengers on a ship’s tender for the trip from our anchorage to the port. It was a beautiful morning to walk the streets of the little village and enjoy the best day of the current trip. We had a tender all to ourselves for a late morning return to the Star Princess. We look forward to smooth seas for our trip and stop at Hilo tomorrow.

There are a few photos from the Foster Gardens in the sidebar.

And now for the rest of the story

Merry Christmas to all from Honolulu, not Nawiliwili.

This has been the most unique of Hawaii cruises. We have come to expect a bit of rough weather coming out of Los Angeles but this year the expected day or two became three days before we began to get smoother sailing. Well, today we were scheduled to arrive on the berth in Honolulu at 07:00 but because of continued poor sea conditions we were over an hour late. Since our scheduled departure was 23:00 the late arrival was of little consequence.

At noon the captain announced that we were not finished with stormy seas and that tomorrow’s Christmas Day stop in Kauai was cancelled. We are now staying overnight in Honolulu and departing for Mauai on the evening of December 25. Kauai is a daylight only harbour and requires some very precise maneuvering to reach the berth, something which factored into the Captain’s decision.

Now to speculate, Maui harbour is very shallow and we will be at anchor, not at a berth so bad weather could be a problem there. Speculating further, Hilo harbour is no joy to enter even in calm seas. Hmmm.