Back in 2013 Val and I took our first long cruise. It was a 30-day round trip cruise from San Diego that visited the Hawaiian Islands and then down into French Polynesia and the Cook Islands. It was a wonderful cruise, and we loved the South Pacific. When we returned home, we noticed that Holland America had an even longer cruise called the Tales of the South Pacific that went even deeper into the South Pacific, and we decided we had to do that cruise. Unfortunately, and much to our disappointment, Holland America stopped offering that cruise before we were able to take it, but that changed last year when it suddenly appeared again on their website, and we booked it for this year.
It is a 51-day round trip cruise out of San Diego that visits the Hawaiian Islands, the island of Tabuaeran (Fanning Island), Samoa, Fiji, Tonga, the Cook Islands, and many islands in French Polynesia. We have been to some of them on our previous South Pacific cruise, but many of them will be new to us and we are very excited to visit them.
We've had a very busy spring and summer and are looking forward to starting the cruise and not have to worry about anything for 51 days. It has seemed to take forever, but we are now just a day away from starting our journey. We are taking the Amtrak Surfliner from San Luis Obispo to San Diego where we’ll spend a day before boarding the ship.
We haven’t planned as much for this cruise as we usually do as Val is having a problem with her hip and will have to have a hip replacement when we return. She is able to get around fine, but too much activity and it becomes a bit uncomfortable for her. She got a cortisone shot today that will hopefully make things easier for her, but we won’t know how well that will work for another week. Val is a real trooper and isn’t going to let her hip get in the way of us taking this cruise, and whatever level of activity we are able to do, we know we’ll have a great time as this area is such a wonderful place to visit.
As usual, when you read this, we will already have returned, and it may take a while to get it fully published as we are returning just before Thanksgiving and then we move into Christmas preparations, so we’ll be busy, but I’ll do my best to publish this blog in a timely manner.
We have some final packing to do tomorrow and then the next day we have a very early morning when we board the train, and our journey begins.
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