Steve and Cathy's Blog

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

We are heading southeast from Dalian, China and will travel 628 miles to reach Nagasaki, Japan.  As our destination is “The Land of the Rising Sun,” we thought it appropriate to lead with the photo of today’s sunrise at 5:40am.  Our goal is to reach Nagasaki by 8:00am tomorrow. King Neptune may have other ideas, because by 8:00am the sea is roiling. We are on Day 96 of our 180-day journey, and we have really been

We meet for breakfast around 8:30 the next morning. Same place – Floor 25. As we approach the room, Steve smells seafood. Ahhh, we must be in China. There is a very extensive breakfast with every kind of Chinese dish you can imagine. Cathy is delighted. Steve is in search of western offerings and is rewarded. Everybody gets what they want. We chat about how hot the rooms were and how it was impossible to turn

We arrive at 9:00am to this very busy port and industrial city of 5 million +. It has had a very interesting history due to its proximity to Russia and Japan, both of whom occupied the area in the 20th century. After WWII, it was under the control of the Soviet Union but administered by China. The USSR ceded the area to China in 1955. It is the 8th busiest port in the world by tonnage,