Awake at 7:30 this morning, I figure I'll try again to get out the blogs on the Internet and find it's working great. I load all information to the TravelPod website and send out a batch of entries. Mom gets up and we finally head for breakfast after 9am. There's a lecture this morning at 10am on "The 10 Best Cruises for your Bucket List". We listen to that one from Lucy followed by another presentation by Melvyn Foster titled "Heroines of the Seven S...

We know it's Sunday because the football games are on at all the bar TVs aboard ship. It's never our local teams but we don't watch anyway. The extra hour of sleep was great but we're going to have to pay them back someday. We are now five hours behind West Coast time. For example, right now we're sailing west towards Pago Pago, Samoa with around 400 miles to go and it's 4pm and 85F. Back home, it's 9pm and according to our info, it wa...

The alarm goes off at 6:30am but I ignore it for 20 minutes. Time to get up, have a light breakfast and prepare to disembark the ship for Fanning Island. Far off the beaten path and almost 1000 miles south of Hawaii, Fanning Island is a remote, beautiful hideaway with just over 1,300 inhabitants. Locals call it "Tabaueran," a Kiribati word meaning "heavenly footprint." The island is an atoll -- a ring-shaped coral reef enclosing a protected lagoon and shaped like...

It's Saturday all over again. This International Date Line makes following the blog difficult. We had no Friday but two Saturday's. Referring to the picture of the International Date Line I posted on October 15 and our cruise schedule to the right, you can see that we pass over it numerous times on our journey. Days disappear, then reappear later. All I know is that when we get home, everything will work out. Tomorrow the clock turns back one more hou...

We have two sea days before we get to Fanning Island, an atoll about 1000 miles south of the Hawaiian Islands. The weather is partly cloudy but always warm and humid, mid 80s. I'm determined to get the blog caught up in these two days but there are so many things going on all the time, it's easy to become distracted. Today we cross the International Date Line and instantly lose Friday, October 16. We go from the 15th to the 17th just like that. Now, tomo...