Steve and Cathy's Blog

For the next three days, we will be at sea heading northeast through the South Pacific Ocean.  We will travel from 41 degrees South latitude, the farthest south of our entire around the world journey, to 21 degrees South latitude to the island of Tonga.

May 19^thand part of May 20^th, we are traveling up the New Zealand coast.

After that we are very much out to sea. Saturday the 19^thwe spend the morning in Horizons, with Steve trying to catch up on this blog and Cathy doing needlepoint.  Cathy gets into an interesting conversation with our friend Brenda, another ATW guest.  Lunch is at the Waves Grill, the quickest and easiest place, at Steve’s request so he can concentrate on writing today.

We had been reading with more than casual interest about the activity at the Kilauea volcano on the island of Hawaii because our ship is to call on the Port of Hilo on the island on Wednesday, June 6^th.  This morning we received word from Captain Morvillo that Oceania has wisely canceled that stop and so we will proceed directly to Honolulu and “overnight” there. Up until now, our list of canceled stops was due to sand bars and tides (Penang), weather (Madagascar, Shanghai, Melbourne, Tasmania), political concern (Seoul, South Korea), and a pollution alert (Boracay Island, Philippines).  Now we can add Hilo, Hawaii and attribute the reason to a volcano! Oh well.

We of course go down for a nap, this time around 1:30pm.  By the time we get up at 3:30, the sea has become very active, with the ship encountering 10-foot waves.  That makes activities in the Insignia Lounge fairly bouncy, which is kind of too bad. Today is The Royal Wedding, and the entertainment team on the ship has very creatively planned Pre-Wedding Coverage at 8pm tonight to be followed by broadcasting the wedding itself at 11pm. If the party that is planned is anything close to the creativity shown when the Super Bowl or Academy Awards were celebrated on board, this is going to be lots of fun.  But neither of us do well in Insignia Lounge in this kind of sea, so we do what we do best – go to bed at 8:30 rocked to sleep by the Pacific Ocean.

Sunday, May 20^this another pretty quiet day.  There is a mandatory safety drill at 10:15am which takes up an hour of the morning.  Then around 4:00pm we go up to Deck 9 to join some of our friends for “Cigar Time.”  No cigars for us, of course, but it is fun to be with Paul, Rich and DJ Brian O’Dell.  Brian has 6,000 songs on his iPhone and a very nice speaker.  He plays them at random and we all guess the artist and title.  Cathy is very, very good at this.  Steve sees that the sunset is going to be a beautiful one and photographs it from Deck 10 (one photo heads up this post).

We end the day by calling Room Service for dinner: Caesar salad and a California roll. Again we crash early.

Monday, May 21^stis a repeat of yesterday, except that we moved the clocks ahead again.  We have been talking to many of our fellow Around the World travelers and we are the same mind: “Thank God for Sea Days.”  While we are in port, we want to take advantage of every minute on shore.  We just got finished with five days in four ports in New Zealand, so these days are real R & R.  As we’ve mentioned in these posts before, neither of us are real cruisers and don’t participate in many of the activities anyway.  Now we are finding some of our friends bagging off of them as well.  If we did anything special, we neither made notes about it nor remember any details. So let’s end this post right now!