Skip all this stuff and view our annotated pictures | Main

Together, Mei-O and I took a lot of pictures and videos. It took me quite a while to go through them all, choose the ones that I wanted to use^noteThere are about 900 pictures
and 40 videos here, including
several pictures from Teresa., edit many of them (straighten them, fix perspective issues, adjust brightness and contrast, etc.), research them when necessary, and write the narrative to go along with them to show the progression of our journey. It is important to note that this is not just a website full of pictures of beautiful scenery and historic sites that we saw on the trip, but rather, a relatively complete chronological accounting of where we went, what we did, and what we saw, including things like street scenes (without any of us in the picture), the open sea, our ship, some of our meals, selfies, maps, and other perhaps somewhat mundane pictures, and all of it from my viewpoint. The format of the site makes it easy to skim through pictures when you find them not as interesting as you hoped.

Some Further Notes

General

1. Hawaii is an island state of the United States^noteHawaii became the 50^th
   state on August 21, 1959,
   seven months after Alaska
   became the 49^th state on
   January 3^rd. in the Pacific Ocean about 2,000 miles (3,200 km) southwest of the U.S. mainland. One of the two non-contiguous U.S. states (alongside Alaska), it is the only state not on the North American mainland, the only state that is an archipelago, and the only state in the tropics. It consists of 137 volcanic islands; the eight main islands, from northwest to southeast, are Ni'ihau, Kaua'i, Oʻahu, Moloka'i, Lāna'i, Kaho'olawe, Maui, and Hawai'i, after which the state is named. The latter is often called the "Big Island" or "Hawaii Island." Two-thirds of Hawaii residents live on Oʻahu, home to the state's capital and largest city, Honolulu. Our cruise would take us to four of the islands: Oʻahu, Maui, Hawaii, and Kaua'i.
2. Hawaii is in the Hawaii Standard Time (HST) zone and is 10 hours behind Coordinated Universal Time (UTC), but just 4 hours behind us (CST) in Rochester, Minnesota (e.g., when it's 6:00 PM in Rochester, it's only 2:00 PM in Hawaii). Despite the islands being so far away from us, jet lag wasn't much of a problem.
3. I really failed at capturing our meals. For some of them I may have taken only one or two pictures, and not actually of a significant part of the meal (maybe just a bowl of soup), especially when we ate in the Aloha Cafe (the buffet) when we kept going back for more and more small plates of stuff. So you'll often see a single picture used as a place marker just to maintain the timeline's continuity.
4. I was very inconsistent in my use of diacritical marks that appear in many words in the Hawaiian language. The language has two diacritical marks; the glottal stop (ʻokina) and the macron (kahakō), which I sometimes used and sometimes didn't, even in the same word used in different places throughout the website. (And when I did include the ʻokina, I sometimes just used an apostrophe rather than an actual ʻokina.) Sometimes I wrote Kauai, and other times, Kauaʻi or maybe Kaua'i. In fact, omission of the diacritical marks is common in the Anglicization of Hawaiian words, so it really doesn't matter^noteIf you do a Google search
   on Kauaʻi with the ʻokina,
   most of the results that are
   returned will be Kauai with-
   out it.. It's just that I'm very inconsistent in my usage here. Besides, my keyboard doesn't have the proper keys for typing the ʻokina and kahakō which would make it difficult to always use them when necessary. I'd basically have to either copy and paste them from some other word where they already appear or use special codes^note

   Programming note for me
   the ʻokina is ʻ
   Ā is Ā	ā is ā
   Ē is Ē	ē is ē
   Ī is Ī	ī is ī
   Ō is Ō	ō is ō
   Ū is Ū	ū is ū

   and insert them into words when necessary (e.g., I'd have to code Kauaʻi to display Kauaʻi). So I suppose my excuse for not consistently using them is just laziness. My apologies to any Hawaiians who may view this website.
5. There are bound to be some errors in here; typos, spelling errors, links that don't work, factual errors, grammatical errors, etc. Please feel free to let me know if you find any. As a note, when viewing the site on a phone or tablet, there are several programming bugs (mostly related to font sizes. You'll know them when you see them) that I just haven't been able to fix (I'm not that great of a web developer, I just sort of "wing it" at times.) Any other comments, questions, or help improving this site are also welcome.

Navigating this website

1. This website is best viewed on a desktop computer, though it can also be viewed on a phone or tablet.
2. There are a lot of words on this website. If you don't want to read them all, you can just fly through it by clicking on the blue underlined links to supplemental pictures and videos, but you'll be missing a lot.
3. As you're viewing the various pages of this website, click on any picture to see it full-size.
4. When you see a link followed by a minutes and seconds designation in parenthesis like this, (0:25), it means the link is to a video and the numbers represent the length of the video. The video will open in a new window. Important note: As I was developing this website, quite often when I tried to view one of the videos on it, I received this error message. My videos are all stored in Google's cloud, and this issue has been occurring for the last several months prior to my working on this website, even with other videos I store on their cloud for other websites I maintain. When it does happen, simply close the error window and click on the video link again. It always works the second time.
5. When you see a green underlined word or phrase like thisA short supplemental
   note or quick fact. (it looks like a link, but nothing happens if you click on it), hovering your mouse pointer over it will display a short supplemental note or a quick fact. Often, it may appear like this^noteA short supplemental
   note or a quick fact., superscripted and not underlined. Blue superscripted underlined links like this^note are actually links to a longer supplemental note that will be displayed in a new window when you click on it.
6. When I have a bunch of pictures of a specific event to display (e.g., our Road to Hana shore excursion), a link like this Click here to see pictures from... will be displayed which will, when clicked, pop up another window (a so-called "picture page") displaying them. Clicking on any of the pictures will open another window so you can see it full-size.

You can begin with day 1 of our journey (getting from Rochester to Honolulu) by clicking on the image below, or you can go to the day-by-day list below to view any specific day or place. And be sure to check out the "extra pages" below.

Click the image to begin.

Extra Pages

Here are some other pages of pictures you may want to look at:

• Here are all our formal dinner menus in a very readable format.
• Picture pages. At several of the places we visited, I took a lot of pictures which, rather than displaying them on the page for that specific day, warranted their own page. (If you've been through the whole website, you've probably already seen these.)
• Pictures of our Canadian friends (four pages. Most, but not all, of these pictures appear on the day-by-day or Miscellaneous Pictures pages.)
• Miscellaneous pictures, pictures that either didn't fit, or which I just chose not to include, in the day by day narrative of the trip (five pages.)
• All of the page headers I created for this website. They tell an interesting story all by themselves.

And finally, here are my thoughts about this cruise. Warning: they're not pretty.