This is our our 33rd-day of our adventure.  We leave Vancouver in a few hours and will be back in Honolulu tonight.  Some thoughts about this very satisfying journey. My overriding concern was sleep.  Late last year during our two-month itinerary going east on the Norwegian Encore from Seattle to Southampton, followed by a Christmas River Cruise from Amsterdam to Budapest, I began to have difficulty sleeping during the final three weeks.  My worry was that this trip would result in the same because the Oceania cruise was to the east, where we had to make 8 one-hour time changes, shortening the day again. Well, my body remembered that ordeal, did not want a repeat, and kept me sleepy almost all the time.  Compared to not sleeping at all, this was fabulous. Episode 22 of the Kilauea eruption sequence in Halemaumau Crater resulted in 1000-foot fountains of lava.  However, that stopped after 10 hours, which is good, for a continuous eruption can bring volc...

In the  Vancouver Sun  yesterday was a  review of the restaurant we went to two days ago, Din Tai Fung .  A few surprises. It just opened last week. Is Canada's first Din Tai Fung. Can serve 312 customers at once. Raved about their Xiao Long Bao, or Shanghai soup dumplings. DTF XLBs feature Kurobuta pork, and each dumpling is 21 ounces with 18 folds.  Ten for 19.50 Canadian dollars, or divided by 1.39 to $14 U.S. dollars, or $1.40 each. Remember how Japanese wagyu beef was made famous by Kobe? Kurobuta  pork is a Japanese breed developed in Kagoshima of a Berkshire pig from the UK First given as a gift in the 1800s to the Emperor of Japan. There is a history, for in the 1640s, Oliver Cromwell's English soldiers were wintering the Shire of Berk and loved the taste of this unique black pig with white spots on tis legs, ears and snout. However, it was in 1930 that two of these pigs were brought to Kagoshima, and apparently all the "legal" Kurobuta ( meaning bl...

Yesterday was our only day to tour Vancouver.  Why?  It was sunny, with rain scheduled to come last night, and continue into the weekend.  We return to Honolulu on Sunday. The only economically sensible way to see Vancouver is utilizing the  Big Red Bus , where you pay around $70 per person for two days, and hop on and off at 14 different stops.  A bus comes every 15 minutes.  Stop #2 is located across the street from our hotel. Here is another itinerary map with different stop numbers.  Now I know why they don't mention numbers at their stops or show numbers at each stop....because there must be more than one system. I'll begin the tour from Stanley Park, for it seems like the introduction of Vancouver begins from this leg. There could be two versions of some legs because we took the full 1.5 hour trip twice.  I sat on one side of the bus one way, on the other for part of the second, then moved to the front for most of this second time, so you wi...