Day 5 Saturday 1 November

This morning was spent organising ourselves & repacking & we left our apartment by 10.30am & headed off to find where to drop our rental car off to, as well as refilling with fuel. Fortunately it was very simple to find a petrol station across the road from the car rental place. After I worked out what to do regarding paying for the fuel (I needed to have my credit card authorised first) I was very happy that all our driving only used ½ a tank of fuel, $23 worth. After dropping our car off, the rental company had a shuttle bus that took us to the cruise boat terminal, we were the only passengers & had a good chat to the driver along the way. He was very friendly & chatty, telling that 9 of his family lived in a small apartment.

We arrived at Pier 2 around 11.15am & stood in line with our bags for the booking in & boarding process for our cruise on the Norwegian Line ship “Pride of America”. Tereza received a beautiful real orchard lei, I got one made from shells. It took a little time with the sheer number of people boarding the ship. When we got to the ticket counter where we received our ship & cabin pass the attendant told us we had VIP tickets & escorted us to a separate private waiting lounge area with hors d’oeuvres, drinks, coffee & lounge chairs while waiting to be personally escorted onto the ship where we met our concierge, Thomas Meir. The room that Thomas took us to was one of the specialty dining rooms, Cagney’s, where he explained that the sign that said “Closed for private function” was for us, we were the private function & this was to be our private dining room for breakfast & lunch. Cagney’s is the most expensive optional dining room on the ship. We were briefed on different aspects of the ship before heading off to find our cabin on deck 11. We discover this is the same level as the pool & spa, level 11.

Our cabin is very spacious & well appointed. It is WOW, WOW, WOW. We have a large lounge, a dressing room with slippers & fluffy white dressing gowns, a king size bed. A very large balcony complete with table, 4 chairs & 2 lounging deck chairs. In the lounge area on the coffee table a huge bunch of long stemmed red roses, another beautiful Hawaiian native flower arrangement & that’s not all, a bottle of champagne in the ice bucket & hors d’oeuvres to go with it. Wait for it, we have a butler as well. We head back down to Cagney’s Dining Room & indulge in a very nice lunch before heading off to explore the rest of the ship. From the top deck we watch the ship depart the port of Honolulu then watch the lights of Waikiki before heading down to dinner at Cagney’s. The dinner was absolutely delicious, but too much food. Our bags had arrived at our cabin & our young Philippine cleaner insisted in taking it into our cabin. We unpacked & settled in. That night the sea was fairly rough with a strong wind so the ship bounced around a bit, if 80,000 tons can bounce.