Shadows and Tall Trees

 It was kind of a rough morning for me. We get off the ship tomorrow, and there are so many things to say goodbye to: goodbye to my routine of getting up and running on the track; goodbye to my plate of crispy bacon for breakfast; goodbye to trivia; goodbye to our stateroom; goodbye to the food and drink; goodbye to all the good people we've met (Pam, Di, Allen, Peter, Joanne, Bob, Brenda, Paul, Helen, Julie, Peter, Tim, Sylvia, Dennis, Ken, Steph, Jacinta, Michael, Patty, and more than a few others I'm neglecting to mention); goodbye to the evening hot tubbing; goodbye to the friendly staff we've made connections with; goodbye to the supper table that made us feel like part of a family these last 11-or-so days. But most of all, goodbye to the late nights on the upper decks, where it was just me, my thoughts, and this tiny speck of a ship in the incomprehensible inky vastness of an uncaring ocean stretching out in every direction everywhere forever. The water this morning w...

On or about Oct. 22, the good ship Quantum of the Seas dropped anchor off the island of Raiatea. Raiatea is the second largest of the "Society Islands" of Polynesia, behind Tahiti, and is thought to be where organized migrations of Polynesians to Hawai'i, New Zealand, and the eastern Polynesian islands began. To put things in some perspective, it's about 4000km to both Hawai'i and New Zealand from Raiatea, and these people made the trip in tribal canoes, using the stars, ocean currents, and migratory birds as their guides. We're in a 170,000 ton ocean liner and we're still being tossed around like a piece of cork. I can't begin to imagine what their trip might have been like. The harbour is not deep enough for the ship to dock, so the ship arranged to take tenders ashore. Apparently, this was the first time Royal Caribbean has visited Raiatea, and there was a small ceremony for the captain and some of the crew to mark the occasion. I guess they normall...

About those bananas. Way, way back on Day 11 we were on the island of Moorea in French Polynesia. We bought a T-shirt, mailed some post cards, hung out at the beach. A stingray the size of an oven door swam lazily past us while we were in the water. I got sunburned, and was subsequently told this by literally everyone we knew. We talked to some people from the ship who rented some scooters, and while there's a perimeter road around the island, there are few, if any, roads into the interior. But there are a number of fruit stands dotting the main road, and we passed these on our way to and from the beach. Each one appeared to have a healthy selection of fruit. I didn't see any fruit in the trees, but this was probably because the low-hanging fruit (heh) was already picked by the locals, leaving only the difficult to reach stuff. (I did find some mangoes smashed on the ground during my run the next day, making me think these might have fallen from higher up in the trees.) On our ...

Don't get too excited -- we don't have COVID. I've just providing a COVID update because the things I should be writing about are... hard to write about. And updates like, "We spent the day at the beach!" are boring AF. So I'm filling some space with something easy and hopefully interesting. There's a COVID outbreak on the ship. Threads started popping up on the Facebook group for this cruise (there's apparently a Facebook group for every cruise) about an increasing number of crew members masking. Then we started getting posts from people being isolated on Deck 3 because they have COVID. Deck 3 started to have kind of an ominous feel to it. Like Room 101. Reports of cases vary from a few dozen to a few hundred. The most recent information we heard (from someone whose reliability is hard to determine) is about 100. That's 3.5% of the passengers. Is that a big deal? I don't know. What I can tell you is that I have no interest in getting it again,...

The first day of the cruise, Steve from Canada said that people have been known to gain a pound a day on the ship. It's me. I'm people. We went on a five-day Carnival cruise to Cozumel in 2015, and I gained five pounds. We then went on a seven-day cruise to Alaska in 2016 and I gained seven pounds. This is an 18-day cruise. Losing a day at the International Date Line never came at a better time. We decided to spend some money and go on a galley tour yesterday. Not too different from any other industrial kitchen, but it was interesting to get behind the scenes and talk about the process of serving meals for 3000 passengers. Not surprisingly, a lot of time was spent talking about cleanliness and how they avoid contamination -- incredibly important, as it's probably ridiculously easy to spread food-borne illnesses across the entire ship if you're not careful. But we also learned about the crazy scale the galley staff has to deal with. The main four dining areas on the ship...

"How do you market a cruise to people? That seems kinda hard. Do you know what I mean? Like, 'Hey, do you like hotels?' 'Yeah.' 'How about one that could sink?'"  -- Demetri Martin So, obviously, we made it onto the ship. And here I am, late at night and all alone, window howling around me, finally providing an update. On the ship there are port days and sea days. As you might guess, the port days are spent in port, and the sea days are spent SEAsoning french fries with many different and exotic salts. No, wait-- the days are spent literally at sea. This is a repositioning cruise, going from Hawai'i to Australia, to take advantage of the southern hemisphere's warm weather (or maybe to avoid the northern hemisphere's cold weather). And as such, there are A LOT of sea days. Of the 19 days we're on the ship, something like 13 of them are just us at sea, surrounded by the Pacific Ocean and not a whole lot else. The point I'm trying to g...

One of my more frequent sayings is that you can't unsee things. I usually use it in the context of the dark side of the internet, and how there are a lot of things I just don't watch because I don't want to deal with how they might change me. But you can be changed by experiences, too. And I think I might have been changed a little the minute my feet touched the water on Oct. 11. Not at all in a bad way. It feels a little like a weight has been lifted, maybe? It feels a little like the island has embraced me and told me things are going to be okay. Like I'm leaving a little piece of myself here in its care for me to pick up at a later date. Or who knows: I may find out I don't actually need it and not even want it back by that point. I really wanted to get a run in today, seeing as it's our last day here. I ran out toward Diamond Head, thinking I'd just end up doing an out and back. But I decided instead to just bite the bullet and do the full 9k loop. It wa...

As I've already explained, and contrary to how we regularly travel, we didn't plan anything for Hawai'i. Today was our last full day on the island. We'd talked previously about how it would be good to get out of Waikiki for a bit and see another part of O'ahu, possibly by renting scooters and going around Diamond Head or something. But after breakfast at Oahu Mexican Grill (OMG) -- which was great, by the way -- it was clear that wasn't going to happen. So instead we decided to spend our time walking along the beach. Which we mostly did all day. And it was pretty great. We walked south just past the zoo to the War Memorial Natatorium , a cool building with a rich history and, sadly, in great disrepair. And then we talked about the way city councils kick the can down the road about demolishing or fixing these things, and how the Natatorium in Moose Jaw will probably see the same fate in a few years, and how these are the kinds of high-impact cultural projects we...

It wouldn’t be a trip to Hawai’i without this classic from the Surf Punks. Pretty much verbatim what I’m writing on all my postcards.

TLDR : it sucks We had only two things to do in Hawai'i: get a COVID test, and board the ship. We planned to get here a couple of days early in case of flight problems -- there are lots of Australians posting about delays and lost luggage -- but things for us turned out just fine. So we found ourselves in Honolulu for two days with no real plans. With nothing scheduled in a city we've never visited, we decided to just spend the day walking around Waikiki. Starting with breakfast at Aloha Breakfast, a Mr. Breakfast -esque greasy spoon next door to our AirBnB, It was okay. The next stop was the beach, a mere two blocks away, where we took turns standing in the ocean. Standing there in the water, being buffeted about by waves, watching it roll in over the sand, was like something out of a movie. It was even this mystical turquoise colour that regular water just isn't. And even though I was on a beach surrounded by dozens of people, there was a stillness I wasn't quite expe...

 Now I remember why I stopped blogging. I'm not really good at this "do it live, one take, let it all hang out" style of writing. Most times it takes me a little while to get my thoughts together. My usual process is to put things down, let them coalesce, see if I can find the themes, and do a lot of editing  before I post something. But that's not conducive to this style of blogging, which is: get the details of my trip out ASAP because the people crave content! Well, we shall see. Tamara points out this was not our longest travel day. We went to Montreal in July, and that trip took about 19 hours, from getting to the airport to arriving at our AirBnB. This trip only took 15 hours, and we covered almost 5600km. That's 373km/hour -- and most of that was from us hustling through customs in Vancouver trying to make our connecting flight. (Montreal was a mere 124km/h. That is a particularly slow day on the Number 1.) The flights were mostly uneventful. We had Brian (...