Steve and Cathy's Blog

As with anything in life, sometimes you just have to be at the right place at the right time to happen upon something really cool.  Our day starts with just such a thing. We might have mentioned that our day always begins at 5:45am when room service delivers a tray with coffee, milk and a croissant to our stateroom.  Fortunately, they call first, and so they are our wakeup service as well.  Getting up this early

Originally, our itinerary called for us to arrive here at 8:00am and leave at 6:00pm.  So we had booked an eight-hour excursion, Old and New Manila, for 9:00am.  Peter Croyle has prepped us about the city with his Enrichment Lecture on the subject.  Two significant things that he has pointed out: 1) it is the fastest-growing economy in Southeast Asia, 2) it is one of the most densely populated cities in the world, and 3) because

This is hard to admit, but there comes a time when these Sea Days are days we look forward to in order to recharge and catch up.  We just finished five straight days being in ports and were eager to take advantage of every minute.  And we did, so these next three days are a welcome respite. April 14th:  we wake up to some of the roughest weather we have had on the entire voyage.  Not

The morning begins with a serene and beautiful sunrise, and it looks like the day will be clear.  At 6:00am, we are still many miles from Kagoshima, which is about as far southwest as you can be in Japan.  The weather certainly is warmer, and we pass the morning writing, reading and checking out the scenery as it appears from time to time. For reasons that, at this point, escape me, we are told we will

We are now on Day 100 of our Around The World cruise.  It would be a great time to sit back and take stock of what we have done so far, but we are moving much too fast and seeing too much to have that luxury.  As it is, we are days behind recording what we did do, so on we go. Today’s excursion, The Glory of Mt. Rokko,begins at 9:00am and will last 3.5 hours. 

We arrive in Kobe harbor right on time around 8:30am and pass by the sprawling Kawasaki Kobe Shipyard where we see the hull of a huge ship under construction.  In typical Japanese fashion, the ship is cleared and we are prepared to commence our 9.5-hour excursion, Traditional Kyoto, straight away. It is quickly on to our bus, where we meet our guide for the day, Checko.  She welcomes us, and immediately begins giving us information on

Today we take in as much of this amazing city as we can with a 5 1/2–hour excursion entitled Highlights of Hong Kong.  We have opted for the extra-charge version of the same tour in order to be in a smaller group, hoping that we will receive more information and be able to spend a bit more time at each stop.  As soon as we board, our expectations are instantly met, as Lilly, the guide from

Quit note: Yes, our intention was to publish day-by-day, but things got a little out of schedule after our visit to Hong Kong.  Our notes were very thorough, so we said: “let’s go back to that later” so we could post at least within 10 days of when we were actually there.  Today, as you will see, is almost a month later and there have been many other more current posts.  This is such a special

Having left Nagasaki at 3:00pm the previous day, Insignia has sailed clockwise around southwestern Japan and entered the Seko Inland Sea at Kitakyushu during the night.  This beautiful sea is located between three of the four main islands of Japan: Kyushu, Shokuku and the main island of Honshu. It is 250 miles long, pretty much runs east/west and is dotted with 3,000 islands.  In some ways, some of the tiny islands make it look like Ha

As we pretty much anticipated because of yesterday’s sea state, we are not in port at the scheduled 8:00am.  By 8:30, however, we are passing by the large Mitsubishi Heavy Industries shipyard that occupies four miles of shoreline.  There are two large Liquid Natural Gas tankers under construction, and we see a Japanese Navy destroyer that was built there as well.  The sun is shining and the temperature is a perfect 70 degrees. We are at