A fairly uneventful day today, late breakfast, 2 mile walk around the deck, late lunch, learnt about the geology of the Hawaiian Islands, met up with the gang for happy hour, saw a large pod of dolphins and then another mile around the deck before dinner.
I had not appreciated that the mountains on Hawaii are the tallest in the world, base to summit, exceeding Everest by about 5,000 feet! The islands are moving North East at about 5 inches per year and eventually will slam into Japan! There has been an ongoing eruption on the big island for about 30 years and the island continues to grow. There is already another underwater volcano erupting to the South East that will become the next island in the 1600 mile long archipelago.
Monday April 4, 2016; Day 2 at Sea
Met Kathy and Gwen at breakfast. Kathy has decided to try and get assigned to an earlier dining time as she finds eating at 8pm too late for her body clock, 1 done, 11 to go!
We have another relaxing day planned of which more later.
We enjoyed lunch in the main restaurant today and sat with two ladies, mother and daughter, from British Columbia, Canada. Mum turns 90 this year and daughter turns 60! They cruise every year together!
Went to two very interesting talks today about the migration of the peoples of east Asia to Micronesia, Melanesia and Polynesia and their subsequent migration to Hawaii from both the Marquesa Islands and Tahiti. It is amazing to think that they were able to travel over 2000 miles of open ocean and find their destinations using only the stars, wave patterns, sightings of land birds and cloud formations! This is the art of the Wayfinder, an art almost lost, but one being rebuilt with a new generation proud of their cultural heritage. The Hawaiians were able to recreate these journeys in the late ‘60’s and today there is a Polynesian Voyaging Canoe on a global roundtrip to create awareness for a green planet.
We are keeping up with our exercise regime and walked for 2 miles this morning and one mile this afternoon. On both occasions we met up with a couple who had suffered the great wait with us at check-in!
Tonight was a Gala evening, so dress up time! Had a nice meal and then enjoyed the music at the Piano Bar and then B.B. King’s Blues Club.
Tuesday April 5, 2016; Day 3 at Sea
We’ve really settled into a nice routine now. A late breakfast in the Lido restaurant followed by a 2 mile walk around the deck and then either a small snack or afternoon tea before meeting up with the gang in the Crow’s Nest for Happy Hour, then another mile around the deck before dinner and then listen to some music in the Piano Bar and B.B. King’s Blues Club before retiring for the night.
We also went to a couple of talks one sent us to sleep so can’t tell you what that was about, but the second was a very interesting talk about volcanoes and how the Hawaiian Islands were formed and how erosion over the millions of years has shaped them. The island chain has formed over a hot spot in the earth’s crust and as the Pacific plate moves over this stationary place volcanoes form that eventually break the surface of the ocean and continue to grow until the island moves off the hot spot and the process continues. Mostly the volcanoes never breach the surface and there are many sea mounts below the surface along the island chain. Once the island stops growing the forces of nature start to erode the island, apparently lava that cools quickly is not a very strong rock and erodes quickly. They have reason to believe that the current island of Maui was much larger than it is today and that all the adjacent islands were part of a single island. Eventually, all that will be left of the Hawaiian islands will be Atolls, the outer ring the evidence of the crater and maybe a small central island the plug of the original volcano (The plug usually takes longer to cool and is subsequently a much stronger rock.)
We are doing our best not to eat too much and we’re targeting to get in our 10,000 steps a day, so far so good!
The weather has been improving steadily since we left San Diego and got much warmer once we left the cold waters off of the California coast.
Wednesday April 6, 2016; Day 4 at Sea
Woke up this morning to rain, wind, white caps and a moderate sea.
Managed to get our walk in although we often zig zagged our way our around the Promenade Deck! Added an extra lap today so we did 10 in total.
Managed to get to afternoon tea today, enjoyed it though it was a little rushed as we suspect that there really isn’t enough time to do it properly before they have to get the dining room ready for dinner at 5:30pm.
After dinner we skipped the shows and went back to our cabin to watch a rental movie Spotlight on one of our tablets. The movie is very good and is a fairly damning indictment of not only the Catholic Church, but those other institutions that allowed the church to get away with this travesty for so long.
No comments:
Post a Comment