On Saturday 11/2 we left the Port of Honolulu for our seventeen day cruise to Sydney, Australia.

Since we’re going to be here for a while I thought I would show you around a bit. Our last cruise was on a tall ship (sailing schooner) with only 200 passengers and about 80 crew members. We are now on an eleven story floating city with 2000+ of our closest friends and 900 crew members.     There is a shopping mall, several restaurants in addition to the main dining room, a casino, a spa, a theater, swimming pools, a walking track a gym… this place is huge.

They offer lectures and classes of all sorts – zumba, yoga, hula, lei making, napkin folding, astronomy  , recycling at sea. You name it they’ve got it.  We’ve attended some of the lectures, and Tom took hula lessons  – just joking about Tom and hula. We do go to the shows every night,   and they have been great.

In Hawaii we had gotten used to hiking and not eating a whole lot. On the ship there is an overwhelming amount of food and not many places to hike, so we have started walking the track each morning. The track is just over 1/10^th of a mile so 48 laps makes a five mile hike  or 8 kilometers that sound much more satisfying. The view is pretty monotonous but it should keep us in shape and maybe prevent gaining some of the extra pounds.  The track gets pretty crowded – a fit minded group I guess – so this morning we were on the track at 6:15 AM and were astounded to find half a dozen people already walking. By 6:45 the crowd had grown to 20+.  I’m not getting up any earlier to avoid the crowd!

On Tuesday 11/5 we checked off another item our bucket list – for the very first time in all of our travels we ventured south of the equator.   There was a gala affair planned for both pollywogs (first time equator crossers) and shellbacks (the “been there/done that” group) and overseen by King Neptune – AKA Poseidon. The ceremony is held at each crossing to ensure the safe passage to the Down Under or wherever you are going. We got our certificates and are now officially shellbacks – woohoo!

And so go our days at sea, Bo voyage until the next time.