Map of the world cruise

We are just hanging out at home in Texas waiting for our departure on 8 January. Thought you all would like to see our home as we travel the world.

Just seven more days to go and we are on our way!

Good morning everyone.

Our trip from Austin to LA was uneventful and smooth. Only hiccup was that Alaska Air had overbooked our flight by 15 people and it took a while for them to find 15 souls to take the next day flight and be compensated with food coupons and a card $1000 voucher. We were finally off and actually got into LA a bit early.

January 10-12. Sea days galore.

I realize I have been lax in my daily entries but to be honest there hasn’t been a lot happening on these sea days.

Ever since we left LA and started to head south we have had rolling seas. The first couple of days it was constantly overcast but not a lot of rain. On day three the seas calmed down just a bit but that was short lived and yesterday they picked up again in the range of 10-12 ft. Last night they increased significantly again and are now in the 16-20 ft range. Closer to the 20 ft level I suspect. We are about 1600 miles from LA now and probably 600 or so miles from Hawaii. We are scheduled to dock in Honolulu on Sunday the 15th. A break from sea days will be welcomed.

We did have our second itinerary change of the cruise. We were scheduled to be in Honolulu on Sunday and then Kauai on Monday. Evidently Viking could not get enough tour guides and bus drivers for our excursions in Kauai so the captain made the decision to cancel that stop and spend a second day in Honolulu.

Honolulu Hawaii

Sorry for the lack of entries again but we are having great difficulty with the blog program that I am using.for some reason it has decided it does not like pictures to be included in my posts. It will only upload my posts if they are text only no pictures. This kind of makes the blog useless because no one wants to read my ramblings without at least a couple of pics to view. Am working on the problem but I have concluded that the problem is not on my end but on the developer’s. Enough on this.

We have arrived in Honolulu this morning and after 7 days of high seas we are happy for a little break from the rolling and pitching. Since we are here for 2 days we took the included excursion which was a city drive then the Pearl Harbor memorial museum and the submarine museum. It was a lot different visit than when Mary and I were here many, many years ago. Evidentially the park service took over the monuments in 2012 and made it into a huge tourist attraction. We spent most of our time in the submarine museum and in the Bowfish WWII sub. I have many great pictures of it but unfortunately at this time can’t show them.

Tomorrow we are scheduled for another excursion to the Bishop Museum (bishopmuseum.org) and then we are off for five sea days before we arrive in Bora Bora.

Hopefully we will have this blog problem fixed by then so I can post pictures. I do promise that when it is working again I will try to edit previous posts and include the pictures that belonged with them.

In closing I would like to say that we had a great lobster and steak dinner yesterday evening. Mary couldn’t finish her lobster tail so I had to rescue it. She did however manage to choke down her chocolate lava desert. Have a great picture of that but oh well you can’t see it.

Till tomorrow

R

More of our stay in Honolulu including our visit to Bishop Museum.

On our second day in Honolulu we visited the Bishop Museum. It is a beautiful campus and just loaded with not only the history of Hawaii but most of Polynesian history as well. A link to their website www.bishopmuseum.org The Bishop family was very instrumental in the education of Hawaii’s children.

Today is 17 January

This morning I received an email from the technical folks at my Journo website. They informed me that they have been working the problem and have concluded that the problem is being caused by the date and time setting in our devices and I needed to go into my settings and change the time zone to “Mumbai”. So I did that and now everything seems to be working. I informed them that it was a nice temporary workaround but certainly not a permanent fix because I wasn’t going to use my IPAD thinking it was located in Mumbai. We will see what happens next.

So for now ignore any time stamps you might see on the screen.

Since getting this back in working order I have been attempting to load up the pictures that went with my previous posts. If I got any confused I apologize.

So we left Honolulu last night at around 5:45pm and are now heading south towards Bora Bora. We are currently about 350 miles south of Hawaii and have about 1800 miles to our next port. There are definitely a lot of sea days on the front end of this cruise but as we go along they will decrease.

Seas have been tolerable so far at about 8-10 feet but cap’n says we can expect 30kn winds tonight which should give us 12+ swells. Not bad when you are in bed but somewhat of a challenge when making your way down the halls.

Had a very interesting lunch today. Culinary chief decided to buy some Mahi Mahi in Honolulu and prepare fish tacos for lunch. Not what we are used to for tacos but we enjoyed them nonetheless.

Let’s start off with a little housekeeping.

I want everyone to know that to follow us on this blog you DO NOT have to log in or establish an account with Journo. The page that comes up first on the blog is confusing and I know some folks have been led to believe that they need an account to view our blog. This is not true.Journo is an easy blog app to use but it certainly could use some upgrades and bug fixes.

Since we have left Hawaii we have essentially had no internet. Email and texts will go through but any attempt to bring up a website will be unsuccessful. Any attempt to update the blog is impossible. When you read this it will probably be Sunday or Monday when we are in Bora Bora and get the net back. Right now we are a little past half way there. We lost our starlink connection as soon as we left Hawaii and hopefully will re acquire it on Sunday. By the time we hit New Zealand I am hopeful that our service will improve for a good portion of the cruise. Ours is the first ship that Viking has installed star-link on and as is with any new technology it will have its growing pains. I guess coverage over the largest body of water on the planet is not the highest priority right now. We are literally in the middle of nowhere out here in 15000 feet of water.

As of 12:47 19 January this is our current position.

So on a lighter note, yesterday Viking lifted the requirement for all crew members to wear masks. There were a lot of very happy crew members running around. It is nice to be able to see who you are talking with. Congratulations to all.

It’s the 20th Friday and we are still sailing in the great Pacific Ocean.

At 2357 hours (that’s 11:57pm for you non military types) last night we crossed the equator and are now officially in the Southern Hemisphere. 1500 miles south and west of Hawaii and 700 miles north of Bora Bora. Arrival expected sometime late Sunday morning. We have two excursions planned for Sunday including a 22 mile trip around the island and a small boat trip around the bay.

Here is our current position.

The seas have calmed down just a bit.

And for lunch today the kitchen decided to have some fun with a cherry pie.

So after a very frustrating week trying to get this software to work correctly and several emails with the company I have decided to give up on it and attempt to use my backup plan.

If you would l8ke to continue to follow our blog then you will have to go to the following website.

Www.Travelwithrickandmary.com

If you have trouble with it please email me at

Buddrus1@gmail.com

One more reminder to everyone. If you are still following us on this blog I will remind you that I am no longer posting here.

The blog is now at

Www.Travelwithrickandmary.com

If you have any problems getting to it please feel free to email me at.

buddrus1@gmail.com