Maui Hawaii - Pride of America

I was awake during parts of the night, the ship was moving not wildly but not smoothly :) I made sure to have my Dayquil every 4 hours to try to get healthy again. We woke up to a rainy 7:30am as the boat was coming into port - the aft and back starboard quarter had a nice view, but the rest was nose-in against the dock and container area.

Bob got a call that golf was cancelled due to very soggy conditions, so we hung out in the cabin for the morning. I took the time to use my Verizon Wireless laptop connection to load up all my notes and photos until now, for people who were following my voyages live.

We got a call that our bag was now on board and ready to be picked up on deck 3. Bob went down to deck 3 to pick up our bag. He was then told it was out with security. So he went out onto land and got the bag - but the bottle of port wasn't with it. He was told the port was on the ship. So he tried to get on the ship - but now a line had come loose and he couldn't get back on. He waited for them to re-secure the ship and came back on. Now he was told they had put the port into a 24 hour quarrantine and we couldn't get it until tomorrow. Now with a regular wine this wouldn't be that big of a deal, but port is a sipping kind of wine. I can barely get through a bottle of port on a full 7 day cruise - now I'm going to have to drink an entire bottle in half a cruise? It's a bit odd and frustrating.

What it turns out is that the airline DID deliver the bag to the Pride of Aloha on Saturday. The Pride of Aloha realized it wasn't theirs and sent it over to the Pride of America. But the Pride of America didn't get it on board on time. So it then waited around in Honolulu, and instead of sending it to Hilo, they didn't do anything with it for a day, and then sent it to Maui today. Very odd!

Well, in any case, we now had all our bags, were down one bottle of port (which they labelled as "puerto rican rum" on our receipt, and also put the wrong room number on the receipt). So we're closer to set :) It was time for lunch! Time for me to climb out of bed and see how well I'm doing, and make sure I don't breathe on anybody :)

The boards said the Cadillac Diner was empty, so we headed over there. The boards were wrong - there were 8 people in line waiting. It turns out their outside deck was closed because of the rain, but the system thought with only half of the "available seats" used that there must obviously be seats available :) Still, the line moved quickly since it was 2pm and soon we were going in to sit down. The decor was very pretty, in that dinery sort of way - guitars on the walls, shiny table tops and so on. However, there were 90s MTV rock videos blaring on the wall monitors and sound system, and the waitresses were wearing Hawaiian shirts and not 50s waitress outfits. So the theme sort of faded there :)

This was all about comfort food - which of course was perfect for me, being sick. I had the chicken noodle soup (VERY salty) and meatloaf which was juicy and wonderful with mashed potatoes. Bob had the burger, fries and onion rings. The burger was a hockey puck. The fries were OK, and the onion rings were great but there were only four of them. We had heard the brownie was great but I was full already after the dinner, so we decided to try the brownie later on. Service was VERY quick - we were in and out in about 30 minutes.

Bob went off to hit some golf balls (the net still had a hole in it, but he was going to angle the mat to avoid the hole). I decided to take a quick walk along this deck to take pictures before going back to bed. Along the way I ran into Joyce from Cruise Critics in the Napa Valley Wine Bar and we sat and had a lovely chat for a while. Then I headed back to the room.

I rested in the room for about three hours, and the surf outside the window got nastier and nastier as time went on. This then segues into the exciting part of the trip notes, i.e. the "leave Maui even though we strand 450 passengers on the island before the ship gets pounded into the dock" :)

Photos from the morning at Maui

Hawaii Travelogue and Photos

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