We returned yesterday to Honolulu after one week on the Norwegian Pride of America.  Departing Kauai. A Liberty dinner with Abraham Lincoln. The best wine on this cruise was Conundrum. Dinner. Goodbye Abe. Saturday morning, arrival in Honolulu. A rainbow greeted us. Before departing the ship, had our first breakfast. All in all it was worth the money and enjoyable.  On the other hand, there were issues that make me want to say I won't again board this ship until certain improvements occur.  For one, the WiFi was terrible.  When we asked a staff member, they uniformly said all is fine.  But I guess that this what they are told to say in that nothing was wrong because this is the way it is on this ship.  It typically took me several minutes to download a photo when it should have been two seconds.  What made it worse was that we not that long ago returned on a 53-day cruise on the Seabourn Odyssey, and in the most remote portions of the South Pacific, the worst it got was the best

I earlier mentioned that my very first airplane flight was when I was around 10-years old from Honolulu to Maui.  I was born at Queen's Hospital in Honolulu in 1940.  Grew up in Kakaako and when I was in high school, took a trip to Hilo.  The first 18 years of my life was otherwise spent on Oahu.  I left in 1962 for Los Angeles to spend the summer living with my older brother, who got me a summer job at the Naval Civil Engineering Center, Port Hueneme, California.  Then spent 3.7 years at Stanford University. During our junior year, most of my friends decided  to join the first full year of John Kennedy's just announced Peace Corps when they graduated.  So I had to do something similarly sacrificial.  To explore my possible future, I found a summer job with C. Brewer in Hilo.  Lived in the Boys Club, and adjacent was the little league field of a team I watched.  They went all the way to Williamsport for the Little League World Series in 1961. The Big Island became home after I

Most tourists to Hawaii fly into Honolulu and spend most of the time in Waikiki, perhaps taking an around Oahu tour and a luau.  Some are more adventurous, flying to at least another island, which takes packing and moving about.  If you want to see all of Hawaii, the best way is to take Norwegian's Pride of America on a 7-day cruise that begins and ends on Saturday.  I've done this maybe half a dozen times, and enjoyed all of them, and have reservations to do this again on September 2.   That will be a grand nine-day period, for the Hawaii football team hosts Stanford on September 1 and women's volleyball welcomes the University of Southern California.  Then the following weekend, Hawaii plays Albany ( they have a football team?? ) at home, while the women's V-ball team has a tournament at The Stan with Liberty, UCLA and Pepperdine. About your coming adventure  (this article was written a year ago, so some ship facilities were closed...but not now ), first, you board an