Day 7 - Honolululu

One of the interesting things our guide Kana pointed out yesterday was the single high rise building in Hilo. He says that the folks in Hilo took a look at the overbuilt waterfronts of Oahu, said “no thank you”, and put a height limit on the buildings. Sailing in towards Honolulu you can certainly see how that could be. One nice thing about Honolulu, though, is that you dock pretty much right in the middle of town, which is kind of cool. Woke up early as we were pulling into port – the thing is, everybody has to go out on their verandah when we’re pulling into port, and they all let their doors slam when they do, so it’s very loud very early. I got up and headed to stretch class & abs class, and then we had breakfast with a very nice couple from (of all places) Manchester, CT. They were a very nice older couple, so it was a very enjoyable breakfast. You might recall that the comedian had done a song called “Old Coots are out there Walkin’”, and they told about how they’d been shuffling down the hall holding hands and blocking traffic, and heard someone behind them who turned out to be the comedian. But they said he was very nice and they had a nice chat.

Then it was back to the room. This morning was laundry morning, so we stuffed a week’s worth of clothes into the tiny all-you-can-fit laundry bag. Then it turned out you have to fill out the form anyway with how many of each thing you’re sending in, so we took everything out and categorized and counted it. Then we had a little time for some blogging before heading out to our shore excursion, the Atlantis submarine. We did the submarine years ago somewhere in the Caribbean and enjoyed it very much, and today was no different. It is very hot here, so it was nice once we got out on the ship that shuttles you between the shore and the sub. They load two subs worth of people on the boat, and we were on the second smaller sub. They’ve seeded the area with all sorts of things – old airplanes, old ships, Japanese seaweed growing frames- and they basically drive around between them. We saw a spotted eagle ray, two green Hawaiian sea turtles, a black-tipped shark, and numerous fishes. The underwater part is about an hour and I wouldn’t mind if it were twice as long.

Once we got back to the ship it was almost two and we were hungry, so we hopped up to the lido where Dave ate some of the pizza that had looked so good to him yesterday. OK, well, it was probably not the same pizza. I prefer the sit-down dining room but it’s not open that late. After lunch we got back to the room and tried to catch up on some writing – my computer was being very slow and frustrating, so I had a short frustrating time, but it all sorted itself out eventually. Meanwhile down on the dock they were setting up for some sort of concert – check, check, check, one, one, one, hey, check, check… then also some bad singing. The doors to the verandah are pretty sound deadening, but not that sound-deadening. It may be time to go to the other side of the ship.

It was a lazy afternoon aboard the ship. I headed up to the gym around 4 and ran through day 1 of bootcamp on my own – it’s not nearly as much fun by yourself, although I was plenty tired by the end of it. Came back, showered, and headed down for dinner. Only Mama and Merna were there - the rest of our table either ate at the Lido luau or were still ashore. The dining room was about ¾ empty, and we were joined by Gay (Gabrielle) from Tiburon whose table had entirely deserted her. She has one of the big penthouse suites up on deck 7 and gets to go to the Neptune lounge, where peasants like us are not allowed. She was nice and funny and we had a good time. She did comment her towel animal yesterday was a pig, and I had to wonder if maybe ours was too, but Dave says he’s pretty sure it was a cow. Or a dog.

After dinner we went off the ship to the schlocky tourist trap just on the other side of the terminal. They had more junk than you can imagine, and also were having an unusual fashion show made up of prepubescent girls and and adults wearing very strange costumes. We don’t know what it was, but it was not good. We headed back to the ship and walked around outside for a while, discovering a fingernail crescent moon just setting, and Chris the guitarist playing on the Lido deck. He was done at 8, and we walked around a little more and then it was time for me to lie down – I’m exhausted. The ship is supposed to pull out at 11, but I think I may miss it this time, even though leaving port has got to be one of my very favorite things – I love to be at sea! Not that it makes that much difference – lying on the bed with the ship not moving at all I still feel the gentle rocking motion. Tonight’s towel animal: a spectacular elephant.