Cruising to Hawaii roundtrip from Los Angeles isn't for everyone. You have twice as many sea days as on the islands.
If you have limited time off work, then flying to one of the islands for a week might be a better vacation for you personally. Another possibility would be a cruise roundtrip from Honolulu that takes you to a port every day, with NCL Pride of America providing that option.
Arriving at a different island each day we were in Hawaii, as we did on Crown Princess, means you have to be prepared in advance, whereas staying at a beach hotel allows you greater flexibility and the opportunity to go when you feel like it.
The other side of that coin is that a longer island stay can lull you into believing you have plenty of time to do it all later, and the next thing you know your whole vacation has passed without branching out from beach fun.
Then again, just hanging loose in Hawaii is also terrific. You aren't in a race, particularly if you know you can return again.
For many people, Hawaii is a once-in-a-lifetime bucket list item, so if that is the case for you, just be sure to do it right the first time.
I've had many once-in-lifetime trips that turned habit-forming, including Hawaiian vacations, both as prolonged island stays and cruises.
Here's what we did this time in ports, which falls mostly in the category of hanging loose, although starting at a cruise ship instead of a beach front hotel included rides from Lyft and Uber rather than simply walking to the beach.
Rather than re-write previous descriptions of our onboard experience in my CruisePlanners1.com blog, here is a long quote, followed by photos taken onboard the lovely Crown Princess:
If you have never cruised over the holiday season, you need to try it once, if just to see the fabulous decorations. Coral Princess had lovely Christmas trees in many public spaces. In the atrium, green faux-pine garland was strung around the banisters and rails.
The smell of fresh brewed coffee and pastries from the adjoining International Café created a lovely aroma as we sipped wine from Vines and listened to a Russian string duo play relaxing pre-dinner music prior to walking to Boticelli's Dining Room to savor our nightly gourmet, multi-course meal.
After dinner, we usually swung by Crooner's Lounge to hear David Moore, a gifted Scottish pianist and singer who, to paraphrase another Piano Man, is "quick with a joke" or even more likely to rattle off a half dozen one-liners between songs. Some nights, we just stuck around Crooner's for another set rather than going to the main theater shows, but those performances were awesome too.
Productions shows feature a sparkling young cast of great dancers and talented singers. There also were great guest entertainers brought aboard, like rock impressionist Greg London who does spot-on takes of Rod Stewart, Johnny Cash, Ozzie Osborne, Kermit the Frog and others. Jason Ostrowski brought his new tribute to Elton John, "Bennie and the Rest," to the main stage on another night.
In daytime, we attended interesting presentations by naturalist Sharon Faff, who lives on a volcano. I was too late to get a ukulele for Tiki Dave's class, which was just as well, because this time on sea days, we spent a lot of time watching sports on the big Movies Under the Stars screen.
Blessed with sunny weather, we enjoyed watching several World Cup games, including probably the greatest soccer finale ever. We also happened to be lounging in the sun when the Indianapolis Colts took a surprising 33-0 lead over the favored Minnesota Vikings only to lose in the second half to the greatest comeback of all time.
The biggest stars of the cruise were the Hawaiian Islands themselves. We loved every port, including snorkeling with turtles on three islands and hiking to the top of Diamond Head before having a cheeseburger in paradise at Duke's and then lounging beneath an umbrella on Waikiki Beach.
Random Photos Taken Aboard Coral Princess
After these photos, there's a bit more narrative about the feel of our onboard experience.
After stirring my cappuccino one morning, this pattern appeared in the steamed milk. To me, it looks like my sister's Pomeranian Teddy running along the back of her couch to greet me, something that always makes me smile.
On a cruise, we experience many special small moments, some only within our minds.
We form patterns like going to the International Cafe for that morning fresh cup of the steaming beverage of our choice. On a longer cruise, these activities begin to feel like they will continue forever, and these habits draw us back instinctively to that cruise line that makes us feel so at home, sometimes back to the exact same ship.
We become accustomed to the art work on different staircases and make mental note that the starboard hallway has green circles on the edge of the pattern whereas the port side has red circles.
In short, in some ways it is like returning to our youth, when so much is new and exciting but we're happy to be able to figure out some puzzle to help us navigate our way through this beautiful new world.
And even when we return to the same line or ship, it will never be the exact same crew, entertainers, decorations or certainly fellow travelers. As someone told me at a Bridge game one time, each hand is unique for similar reasons.
It's good to awaken your mind anew, and a cruise provides that fountain of youth, if you are open to the experience.
Normally, our Princess Hawaii cruises anchor offshore of Lahaina and then tender passengers ashore. Julie and I have then taken the inexpensive local bus to our favorite beach, Ka'anapali, to spend the day snorkeling and relaxing in the sun.
Crown Princess, however, ported in Kahului, which is on the other side of the island.
Kahului has several advantages, which is probably why NCL Pride of America uses it for their Maui port, where they feature with an overnight stay (two days on Maui).
First, tenders are not required, which is easier operationally for the cruise line and also much easier for passengers who aren't bound and determined to go to Ka'anapali Beach or funky Lahaina town.
Granted, when we cruised on Pride of America, we went to the nearby airport and rented a car, which we drove to Ka'anapali Beach, making a few stops along the way. That brings us to a second advantage of porting in Kahului: it is close to airport rental cars, so you can take the famous Road to Hana or easily drive to gorgeous Iao Valley, which are considerably further from Lahaina, whether you drive or take excursions.
Which brings us to a third big advantage: Kahului opens up shore excursions with shorter van or bus routes for the cruise guests who unlike Julie and me are not set on Ka'anapali for a perfect beach day. Admittedly, our usual DIY bus trip is not too profitable for the cruise ship. And that is a big advantage for the cruise line: more potential revenue while opening new horizons for guests.
If you can see that Maui island viewed from the sky looks very much like a woman's upper profile, getting from Kahului to Lahaina would be starting at the nape of the lady's neck, proceeding just below her chin like a necklace, and then up her face to the lady's hairline, whereas getting to Lahaina to Ka'anapali could be accomplished by raising her eyebrows, if that really was a pliant face.
While we could have taken a tour bus along the necklace to take a catamaran to Molokini or done one of the other excursions that Kahului made relatively easy to reach, we instead walked from the port to a nearby shopping center to catch an Uber to Ka'anapali Beach. We were quite pleased to see that the beach, which had notably shrunk when we visited there in 2018 on what I've oft referred to as our "semester-at-sea" Princess cruise with naturalist Mark Harris, now has as much sand as I ever remember, and possibly more.
Because the ship ported on the other side of Maui's head, we didn't see many cruise blue-and-white-striped ship towels when we camped out in shaded sand near the Sheraton at Black Rock. So, that turned out to be a big advantage for us by porting in Kahului: fewer tourists at our favorite snorkeling spot. Of course, it cost a lot more time and money to get there and back, but it was still worth it.
Fantastic snorkeling as usual, and on this day we had at least three very friendly sea turtles swimming around the coral with us. We didn't see any whales on this cruise, but swimming around the point I was able to hear their song in the distance.
Lunch at Julie's favorite restaurant in the world, Hula Grill. Check.
We had time for renting a lounge chair in front of the Ka'anapali Beach Hotel to just savor the beach before catching an Uber on the other side of the lobby at that hotel, which we used as our access point to the beach, purchasing a pricey Diet Coke in the mini-mart there.
Just after we drove past Lahaina, our driver received an irate phone call from a guy who had left his phone in the Uber vehicle. He was yelling that he needed his phone NOW! Because we had built in an extra hour for our return, in case there was a long delay catching a ride, we told the driver to agree to meet him. So, we took a detour to the huge Banyan Tree in Lahaina.
The irate former-fare's wife was obviously mortified by her husband's tantrum, so she tried to give our driver a $20 bill, which he turned down. As we drove off, we told him that he should have taken it. We certainly weren't going to tip extra for him being forced to go out of his way.
Crown Princess was visible from miles away on the necklace road, a reminder of just how large these floating homes-away-from-home really are. While the drive had not been as easy as raising our eyebrows, it was a great finale in Hawaii for this cruise.
"Use no hurtful deceit; think innocently and justly, and, if you speak, speak accordingly."
--- Benjamin Franklin on Sincerity
As politicians say, the hard one is Sincerity. Once you can fake that, you've got it made.
In an age before principles of electricity made recording audio and video possible, a politician could easily stand for entirely different agendas depending on the whistle stop. It would seem that Benjamin Franklin to some extent had a gift for fitting in wherever he went, as he was well accepted by working men in print shops, erudite company of the greatest thinkers in the vaunted Age of Enlightenment, and the most well-bred aristocrats in European palaces.
If popularity was Ben Franklin's goal, however, he would not have chosen to include Sincerity as one of his 13 Virtues.
Pretending to be something you're not can be the quickest and easiest way of building superficial rapport. We all know people who arrive with a splash, making a great first impression but soon wear thin. They can quickly read a room and mirror their audience, whether a group of strangers or a single woman at a bar. As the people around them change, however, these chameleons morph so entirely that we come to realize there's no there there.
In our family, we definitely have not only differing but strong views on good governance, and as such, in being sincere we inevitably clash in political discussions. Because we live in an age where we view reality uniquely based on our preferred news sources, an age when agreeing on underlying facts themselves may no longer be foundations for conversation, the chasm often seems insurmountable. When I was a teenager, we called this the Generation Gap, so it is not a new phenomenon.
As the education system adapts to changing eras, children come home from school with new-fangled precepts just as surely as with knowledge of mathematical principles, with the former stressed more in the case of under-performing public schools. The same social agendas may be promoted at Blue Ribbon Schools, but they are paired with demanding academic standards.
Brought up in the era of Martin Luther King, I can remember challenging my grandfather at the dinner table once about the terms "Blacks" preferred to be called --- and no, he had not used that N-word but actually what was probably well-accepted during the time in which he lived --- as if I had a smidgen of his real-life experience. My beloved Mom chastised me for being disrespectful to her beloved father, who in turn said it was a shame I hadn't been taught better. It was decades before I understood that episode in my life in context from the other side of the Generation Gap.
By the time I was in my twenties, I had adopted my current bedrock belief that skin color should be ignored as much as possible, judging people as individuals based on the content of their characters. Though championed by Martin Luther King, that concept now is apparently considered less-enlightened than breaking down all people by skin color and sexuality first before deciding how they should be treated. Only a white-privileged, cisnormative troglodyte like myself could possibly believe that mindset could possibly be fair.
To be clear, as far as I know, none of my kids think of me that way. In fact, I think they love me, warts and all.
The latest education fad --- or should I say inevitable glacial movement --- seems to be something called The 1619 Project, which says that Founding Fathers like Benjamin Franklin were nothing but white-skinned, brutal oppressors dressed up in frilly shirts and wigs. For the record, Ben Franklin tended to sport his unfashionable long, thinning, natural hair, except when he wore his American-frontier-inspired coonskin cap, which he popularized in the grand palaces of Europe. I personally see that hat as something of a running joke, putting animal fur on his head instead of a powdered wig of human hair, though I cannot ask Ben to confirm that theory.
These days, wearing animal fur is an affront to half the population, whose most ardent pro-animal-rights proponents would today throw red paint on Franklin's hat to display their disapproval. That's why fur coats that fashionable ladies like Julie's mother Edna would have worn with pride for Masonic or Eastern Star events benefiting charities are now thoroughly eschewed. A handful of rather violent people have essentially banned beautiful, warm coats that had been popular since the Stone Age and were a well-recognized status symbol in the happy days following World War II from being worn in our free society.
Sorry, once again I got off on a tangent. Back to the 1619 Project, which is already being introduced in school curriculums, the basic thesis is to forget 1776 and the 4th of July. Our beloved country actually started in 1619, when the first African slaves were brought to the American colonies. Forget principles like a government of, by and for the people. Forget representative democracy. Forget religious freedom. Forget that slavery had been practiced throughout the world since before history began to be recorded. The foundation of America was all about enslaving black people and protecting that pernicious way of life.
Perhaps I have become so old and set in my ways that I can't see how brilliant this new movement is, but regardless of whether I'm one of a handful or part of the majority, the 1619 Project could reduce Benjamin Franklin to the dustbin of history.
I can't help finding that very depressing. Getting back to the powdered wig analogy, the American experiment was actually a movement of brilliant young men breaking away from powdered wig-wearing royals to birth an entirely new form of self-rule founded on principles of the age of enlightenment.
It worries me that so many recent "progressive" solutions now seem to hearken back to an age of central rule by a governing class who know how we must act better than we, as the unwashed rabble, could possibly comprehend.
It will never get that far perhaps. That's certainly what is always rationalized initially when such reality-shattering concepts are introduced, but over the decades, the pace of change continues to accelerate in the direction of what at first may seem to be irrational positions, to the point where now what I consider rational is frequently ridiculed or demonized.
I didn't breach the 1619 subject in Philadelphia or on a stroll along the Manhattan Beach Strand yesterday with Jay, Sasha, Julie and our granddoggie JoJo.
Allow me to digress a bit here to say that JoJo seemed exceptionally thrilled to see Julie and me, presumably because she has happy memories of hiking with us in Montana last summer. We touched lightly on some other controversial topics, as we seem to no matter what my intentions may be.
During our visit to Philadelphia, we kept politics out of discussions for the most part, and in fact Julie congratulated me a couple of days ago on staying off that subject, though I guess I may have blown that in this post.
Interestingly, Benjamin Franklin didn't enjoy politics, and he tried to avoid being controversial, probably understanding that in sincerely expressing our political opinions with others, we run the risk of them disliking us over what for the most part is an esoteric topic, albeit one which everyone seems to believe they have expertise based on their partisan-focused iPhone news feed or Fox News.
Instead of debates, we focused on joyful shared experiences like the magnificent Thanksgiving feast and rousing games of Tripoley, Monopoly and even an online Bridge game with Jay, who joined us on Zoom from Florida where he, Sasha and JoJo shared the holiday with Sasha's grandmother who has been a shut-in for months on end and would have otherwise had no family with her.
In Merion Station, we also enjoyed sharing some wines Amy and Lukas brought from the Finger Lakes wineries they had recently visited in Upstate New York. I particularly liked the Bear On a Bicycle red wine (Pinot Noir?) for its softness on the palate as well as its quirky label, which was among those we didn't uncork until they had left us to return to Jersey City.
Some photos included herein captured Emma's experiment making colorful ice cubes and virgin-soda-water cocktails for us all to sip from Martini glasses on one festive evening.
As you may have guessed, one unintended result was that we each had our tongues stained different colors, though the photo at the top doesn't quite do that justice.
Before I got off on tangents, the topic was Sincerity, and I can say sincerely we all thoroughly enjoyed our Thanksgiving vacation in the suburbs of Philadelphia, including side trips as far afield as Newton Square, which we knew nothing about until a real estate agent mentioned she lived there. We appreciated being invited to come to the feast, and then being made so welcome from the moment Laszlo picked us up at the airport. As Amy said, it was like being a kid again, when we didn't have to worry about anything, because everything worked out perfectly according to Gina's and Emma's carefully laid-out plans.
Being sincere does not require a dour attitude. Before Benjamin Franklin became a reluctant statesman, he was a well-known American humorist.
Let us toast this country where such a life as Benjamin Franklin's and our own can be possible.
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