In October of 2024, Mei-O and I, along with our friends Teresa and Steve, began looking for a cruise to take in 2025. We actually ended up booking a 17 day Scotland and Norway cruise in June, but everyone was really interested in going to Hawaii, so Teresa kept researching the possibility of a Hawaiian cruise later in the year. There are two ways to do a Hawaiian cruise; from the west coast, you can sail there on a cruise ship which includes five consecutive sea days going there and five more coming back. (Ugh!) Or you can fly to Honolulu and pick up a cruise around the islands from there. We decided the latter option was more what we wanted, so after doing more research, Teresa came up with the 7-night inter-island cruise on Norwegian Cruise Lines' Pride of America documented here^noteI do websites of all our
travels. I do them for me
and Mei-O, so in the future,
we can look back at them
and recall our travel exper-
iences. Hence, the website
will be heavily skewed with
pictures of us and our ad-
ventures.. You can see a map of the route, beginning and ending in Honolulu, below.

Teresa's long-time friends, Alay and Alfred, who live in Toronto and traveled with us before on our London, Spain, and Portugal cruise in 2017, joined us and brought along some friends of theirs, Grace and Maria, making us a party of eight. Alay, Alfred, Grace, and Maria planned to spend some time in Los Angeles and Las Vegas before meeting up with Teresa, Steve, Mei-O, and me in Honolulu to embark on our cruise, but due to the wild fires that had been plaguing the L.A. area for several months prior to our departure date, they ended up in San Diego instead. But that's another story, and theirs.

So here we all are. Click on any picture to see it full-size.

March 7, Mei-O and me at Kalapaki Beach in Nawiliwili, Kaua'i. Our docked ship can be seen in the background.

March 2, Steve and Teresa on the rocks on the Keanae Peninsula on Maui.

March 5, Alay and Alfred along the shore in Kona.

March 8, Grace at the Dole Pineapple Plantation.

March 1, all of us at the extinct Diamond Head volcano in Oʻahu.

March 4, Maria at the steaming Kīlauea volcano in Volcanoes National Park in Hilo.

On February 28^th, we left Rochester en route to Honolulu to begin our journey. We spent one night in Honolulu just to make sure we'd be able to get to the cruise terminal on time before the ship sailed the next day, March 1^st. Once aboard, we made our way to our obstructed view ocean-view stateroom, 7588 (Teresa and Steve were right next door in 7586), port-side on Deck 7 and settled in for a week.

Here's a map of our itinerary, beginning and ending in Honolulu, Oʻahu:

Click on the map to see the details of our itinerary.

Teresa did a lot of research on the trip which we ended up booking through Vacations To Go (a travel company we've used before). We dealt with a very helpful agent, Frederick Nawrot, who helped us book the cruise and answered all sorts of questions for us (and got Mei-O and me a nice discount on the cruise and some extra benefits because I'm a veteran). Teresa found us some appropriate flights for herself, Steve, Mei-O, and I (which all went quite smoothly), and then she worked on finding interesting shore excursions to round out our trip preparation. Many thanks to Teresa! All her work made this cruise enjoyable and successful.

Click the image to set sail!