We are closing in on California. 84F and mostly cloudy. It's tough writing about doing nothing everyday. Sure, there are activities to pass the time while we make our way home and I'll continue to write about them. Just remember that what you all are doing is probably more exciting than anything we're doing here. How's this? "We went to breakfast. I had 3 prunes and Karen had some oatmeal, or was it muesli." Who cares? So you know, the day's...

Not a lot going on today. That's good. We don't even go to breakfast until almost 9am. Then at 10, they have the King Neptune Ceremony out at the pool area. This is a fun activity taken from a mariner's tradition that pokes fun at crew members passing over the equator for the first time. Lots of pomp and circumstance takes place with King Neptune, pirates, lifeguards and officers of the ship. Victims must first kiss this fish statue, then covered with...

No alarm today! We get up late, well 8 o'clock. We have breakfast- the usual. It's almost 10am when Karen and I split up. I attend Kainoa's spiel on Hawaii's conversion from Kingdom to Statehood. He's always interesting and a great speaker. Meanwhile, Mom heads to the pool. We agree to meet in our room around noon to prepare for our Mariner's Society Brunch in the dining room. Dress code is smart casual, you know, dress pants and a Hawaii...

Today we reach our last stop on our South Pacific Adventure, Nuku Hiva. Both Herman Melville of "Moby Dick" fame and Robert Louis Stevenson, author of "Treasure Island", spent time on this island in the late 1800s. Although warm, it's partly cloudy today as seen through our stateroom window at 6am. It's another tender port, demanding that we're up much earlier than we'd like. As with the rest of our full day tours, they all start as soon as possi...

Finally, a day off. We have been up no later than 6:30am every day for the last week. This morning, no alarms, no schedule, nothing. We're still up by 8:30am but it's really 9:00am. The ship turned back their clocks one half hour last night. I've never heard of changing time in half hour increments. Apparently, we lose another half hour on the 10th. That change will put us only 1 hour behind PST. So we have our usual breakfast and, while I retreat to ...