As I said in yesterday's (aka this morning's) post, I did not make it up on deck for what surely would have been a beautiful sunrise. Coming from Oahu, we would not have sailed by Haleakala, but would have instead come past Molokai and Lanai. When I awoke, I immediately got- and stayed- on task with posting about our busy day in Honolulu. I do NOT like to get behind, especially with these several port days in a row.
Interestingly, when I plugged my iPhone in after returning to the ship last night, several messages popped up from friends concerned about the tsunami warning for Hawaii. We had known nothing about it until we were on the sunset sailboat cruise, when I overheard someone asking the boat captain about it. He downplayed it, saying it would be no more than a large tidal surge for Hawaii. But G and I knew that there would be no safer place to be than tucked in our tiny cabin on the Pacific Princess between Oahu and Maui. And, sure enough, the predicted hour of tsunami activity, around 3am, came and went without notice.
So, finally, on to today. This cruise marks a big moment for us in our cruising career (career, because we work hard at this!!)...it is our 100th cruise overall and 75th Princess cruise. Princess calls these cruises (50th, 75th, etc.) Milestone cruises and right away we started noticing some differences. We received a bottle of Nicolas Feuillatte champagne and a plate of chocolate covered strawberries before we even left the ship yesterday morning. We would have received flowers if there was a florist on board this tiny ship but there's not, and that's just as well. We'd have to hang them from the ceiling, so starved are we for counter space what with the minibar setups and paperwork and electronics. But the biggest benefit of a 75th cruise with Princess is that we get to dine in Sabatinis every morning for breakfast, a treat normally reserved for suite passengers.
People talk about scheduling these milestone cruises such that they occur on a really good cruise; i.e. a longer cruise or one with lots of sea days. We had decided a while ago to do the same thing we had done with our cruising different cruise lines...just let ours happen when it did based on taking the cruises we wanted to take. In the end, we couldn't be happier with the timing, on this 12-night cruise with 5 sea days.
So, there I was this morning, lying in bed and vicariously experiencing the sunrise while I was playing post catch-up.
We made our way to Sabatinis (sooo excited!) where waiters Olexis from Ukraine and Ruel from the Philppines greeted us. We were the only people in there for most of the meal, and the Pacific Princess was already anchored off the coast of Lahaina, Maui, so we had spectacular views of the West Maui Mountains and the ship's tendering process right from our table.
Olexis brought us the Sabatini's breakfast menu (we didn't even know there was one), and it was hard to decide just what to order.
In the end, I decided to stick with a fruit plate and scrambled egg beaters because I knew we'd have a busy day, but I did allow myself to be talked into a decaf skim milk cappuccino and small breakfast smoothie with honey and banana (to die for).
Sabatinis closes for breakfast at 9:30am on port days :-(, so we finally had to pull ourselves from our high living experience and take a tender to Maui. This visit we wasted no time in getting the Kaanapali Express bus ($2pp) and got off at Whalers Village. Because the bazillion steps we walked yesterday were not enough :-| we decided to walk first left and then right along Kaanapali Beach, stopping occasionally for a cool drink on the beach.
We returned to the ship about 4:30pm and quickly got cleaned up for the Elite Lounge in the Pacific Lounge. It was port wine and Stilton night (yum) and we were treated to a rainbow over the West Maui Mountains while we imbibed.
It felt like we had not been to dinner in the Club Restaurant for days, and we had been eating pretty sporadically lately. We actually had three courses plus dessert, not something we do very often, but it was also one of our favorite menus that we don't see very often, with my very favorite Italian seafood stew, cioppino, and key lime pie for dessert. Serve those every night, and I'd be happy!
After dinner, we returned briefly to our cabin to start putting together the things we'd need for our excursion in Hilo. It involved pulling out suitcases and finding those things we'd packed 'just in case'. And we needed to get them together before the 7:45pm show because we were both fading fast and didn't want to leave it until later.
The show was vocal impressionist Paul Tanner and he was...okay. We had never seen him before, and that's always a plus, and we wanted to really like him (and didn't dislike him), but, really, how many people sing It's a Wonderful World with Louis Armstrong's gravely voice? Apparently, quite a lot...
After that, we were in bed and asleep by 10pm. We have a big day in Hilo and want to be well rested for it. And then, five sea days in a row. Honestly, we need the break right now. I think our extended Honolulu stay (or maybe it was the Maitais) did us in.