Hawaii 2019 (again)

We are traveling again. Just a reminder that the complete post is not visible in the email. To see the full post and any photo albums you should  click on the Blue “Read The Post” button.

We are once again getting ready to take our private yacht to Hawaii for Christmas and New Year celebrations. We have invited about 2600 of our friends to join us for the 15 day round trip from Los Angeles. We have taken this voyage several times and at least twice aboard this ship. Although we won’t know all of the passengers but there will doubtless be several with whom we have previously shared this voyage. 

The Star Princess was our ship for a 2006 Caribbean cruise and a 2011 cruise from Rome to Venice. She was launched in 2002 and had a minor refit in 2017. Like many cruise lines, Princess appears to have a fondness for ever larger ships. Many of the smaller ships have been given a major refurbishment and a new name with a different cruise line. Golden Princess is next to go to P&O Cruises in 2020 and the Star Princess will follow in 2021, so this will probably be our last cruise aboard Star Princess. Four new large ships are expected to enter service in 2020, 2021, 2023 and 2025. 

In previous years we have arrived in Los Angeles the day before sailing and stayed at a hotel near the airport. This year we will spend that night in Long Beach for a change. We do this for two reasons. Firstly, because winter air travel can be unpredictable so the extra day allows some time for delays and secondly, because Princess makes luggage handling simple. They take us and luggage from the airport to the hotel then from the hotel to our shipboard stateroom. In Toronto we also stay near the airport on the night before our flight. We have to handle our own luggage at this end.

I have added a few new pages to the site which you should find under the menu item “Ships, Past and Present“. The page “Cruise History” catalogs our cruise history by ship. The page “Ship History” documents the life history of those ships which are no longer sailing under the Princess Cruises brand. The page “Basic Ship Specifications” provides basic data describing the vessels on which we have sailed.

This will serve as journal post number one for this tour. Having done this trip several times it will be hard not to duplicate some photos. I am going to try to provide some new scenes so keep watching. The most recent photos should appear in the sidebar to the right of the post. All of the years photos can be found under the “Photo Gallery” menu in the “Christmas Cruise 2019” page. There is a group of historical photos from our Toronto departures at the end of this post.

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