bobmacliberty

Love the drink list idea. Definitely stealing that. If you want to go over 48 drinks, add a New Fashioned to the list. I don't remember the exact recipe but it was on the Ovation Schooner Bar menu and was based on Southern Comfort. Greg will probably know the recipe if your bartender doesn't. Enjoy Bermuda! Love that place.

I'm a huge Tommy Bahama clothing fan. My guess would have also been the USS Happy Hour! Good choice. They will shrink some so the extra length is probably perfect.

We went to a restaurant on St. John called Pussers more than 30 years ago. It's no longer in business but I'm pretty sure they were somehow related to the alcohol brand. We kept a drink coaster from the restaurant and have followed this recipe religiously. Guessing it's the same as the recipe that was attached to the bottle.

We saw them on Ovation a couple of weeks ago. Their music was fantastic. They all had great voices. I thought their between songs jokes were a little corny (my mother was a big girl and she cried at the end of Free Willy), but the singing more than made up for it. Since they couldn't fly headliners on and off the ship for our TP cruise, they were always hanging out on the ship somewhere. The lead guy in the group was usually easy to spot.

Thanks Lenny!

One of my favorite Twitter hash tags is #joshallenjumpingoverthings. People have made some interesting pictures of Josh jumping over all kinds of stuff, including Patrick Mahomes' crazy wife and brother.

Let's see if I can get this review wrapped up. We really enjoyed the Na Pali Coast Sunset Cruise, although the weather was pretty overcast. We used Holo Holo Charters out of Port Allen. There are a few different charter cruise companies located there. We chose Holo Holo because they had good reviews. We talked to a guy next to us on the boat who had been on a Holo Holo cruise a couple of times. He was on his 3rd beer in about 10 minutes and said that he likes Holo Holo because they're the only charter company that has an open bar from the moment they leave the dock. The other charter companies apparently wait until they are cruising back before opening the bar. So if that's important to you... It was about a 3.5 hour cruise. Roughly, it takes an hour to cruise from Port Allen to the southern edge of the Na Pali Coast, 30 minutes to get to the northern end of the coast at high speed, an hour to turn around and go back to the southern end of the coast at slow speed, and an hour to cruise back to the port. The ocean swells can be big so our captain goes high speed into the swells in one direction and low speed with the swells in the other direction. The high speed run can get pretty bouncy and he encourages everyone to only take pictures on the slow speed portion, since we go by everything twice. He wants you holding on for the high speed part. Of course, many people didn't listen and were trying to take pictures/videos while holding their phone in one hand and hanging onto a railing with the other, while bouncing up and down. If you're prone to sea sickness, you should come prepared. The bar is open from the moment you leave port until right before returning to port. They serve free beer, wine, and mai tais, along with water, juice, and soda. They serve pupus (appetizers...cheese and crackers and veggies with dips) on the way to the coast and a hot stir-fry like dinner on the way back. They time the cruise so that sunset occurs right before returning to port, and they have a champagne toast at sunset. Our sunset was almost non-existent because of the heavy cloud cover, but we toasted anyway. Oh well, we saw plenty of great sunsets. WARNING: Large number of pictures to follow. I probably could have posted a dozen more, but they'll probably all start to look the same. One the way to the coast, we passed the island of Niihau in the distance. It's called the Forbidden Island and is the smallest inhabited island in Hawaii. The island has an interesting story, being purchased for $10K in 1864 by the Sinclair family under the agreement that they would keep it isolated for the few hundred natives that live there. The US government reportedly recently offered the family $1B (yes...with a B) to buy the island and they turned them down. More info here. On the way to the start of the Na Pali Coast, there are several smaller seaside hills and cliffs. Everyone was taking a lot of pictures, not knowing that these were just the warm ups. Our boat moved close to the shore to see some interesting caves, and away from the shore to get a better view of the cliffs. It's hard to get good perspective in these pictures, but the cliffs along the water can be 1,000 feet high, and the top of the canyons behind the cliffs are between 4,000 and 5,000 feet high. It's just awe inspiring to see. This section of the coast, called The Cathedrals, is the most impressive in my opinion. It was supposedly named by early English explorers who thought the cliffs reminded them of cathedrals from home. If you're a very experienced hiker and get the needed permit, you can hike part of the Na Pali Coast. It's a 6+ hour hike in each direction. Most people will hike in and stay there for a few days before hiking out. You need to bring everything you need...sleeping gear, food, water, etc. Sounds like way too much work for me. Some will even "speed hike", traveling the entire trail in both directions in one day. Nope. This short video clip shows the beach at the end of the hike. As I zoom in on the waterfall, you can barely make out a person walking at the base of the waterfall. For perspective, the waterfall itself is about 120 feet tall. Waterfall Zoom.mp4 I pasted together several other videos and uploaded them to YouTube.

What a great game. I was very nervous. As I said to @Sea Dog in his Live review, I'm sure the Bills and Chiefs will be seeing each other again this year. Hopefully it will be in Buffalo this time.

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Great catch! The mascots are indeed different. I didn't even notice that. For those that aren't aware, each of the Quantum Class ships has a different animal mascot located on the starboard side next to the rock climbing wall (that sorta look like sponges on the models 😁). For Quantum, it's a 30 foot tall magenta polar bear named Felicia. For Ovation, it's a Mama and Baby Panda Bear

As always between our teams, it was a great game. I don't think we've seen the last of each other this year.

For me, the Pussers's is for a Painkiller, and the Captain is for Captain and Coke. Kraken for everything else. Makes a good floater in a lot of frozen drinks.

Maybe the Kraken is messing with you? 😉😇

That's pretty poor. Must be better options elsewhere. I have faith in you!

Before I jump into our sunset cruise, we also took a brief stop at the Spouting Horn...a blow hole on the south shore. IMG_9912.MP4

Very good advice. I'm pretty tech savvy and figured with a little bit of learning curve, I could go paperless and completely use the app. While that's definitely possible, the app could still use some user interface tweaking. Not as user friendly as I had hoped.

You never know. Liberty still has an R Bar (I think). They may have a good selection there. I'm sure that your search will be very thorough. 😜

While unpacking the suitcases, I found the ship models that we purchased. Cool...something to do instead of the laundry (who am I kidding...Micheline is doing the laundry). We buy one for every ship that we've been on. The models are identical except for the name, which makes sense. A neat feature is the North Star that's magnetically attached to the ship and can swivel. We need to rearrange our display somehow to fit these in. Time for another shelf. Don't know why, but Allure is much bigger in scale than the other ships.

I ended up getting about 3 hours of poor sleep on the plane from HNL to ATL. At least I could lay flat. The plane was one of Delta's older business class configurations, so not quite as comfortable. I watched American Gangster. First time that I'd seen that movie and I was very impressed. I can't recall a single Denzel movie that I haven't liked. Since we were traveling 6 time zones eastward, I used my proven Europe jet lag strategy yesterday. We landed in JAX in the morning and I pushed myself to stay awake as long as I could. We got caught up with survivor on DVR last night and I went to bed at 10:30pm. I woke up this morning at 10:00am! If all goes to plan, I'll be a little tired tonight and then good as new tomorrow. Fingers crossed. Off to do some laundry and then meet the local Bills fan club to watch the Bills play the Chiefs. Should be a great game. I'm already trying to convince myself that this is just one game and is not life or death so that I can enjoy watching. That's true...right @George C?

Your cabin steward should be able to get an appropriate extension cord for you.

A perfect start Greg! First of many. I'm sure I don't need to ask, but I'm interested in the bourbon supply onboard. Hopefully you are close to boarding. Have a great cruise.

Photos are uploaded full size and then are shrunk and compressed online before being stored on the CC servers. If you can easily shrink the photos on your phone, you'll save a lot of upload time. Photos sized straight out of a phone camera app are much larger than needed for just about any social media site.

Micheline and I both agreed that Hawaii needs to be a trip that we take every year or two now that we're retired. But it's a LONG trip from the east coast. It was "only" an 8.5 flight from HNL to ATL, but we flew business class which makes things a lot easier. I'd suggest spending a couple of days in California...maybe going in each direction...to break it up and allow a few days to adjust to the time change.

I want to rewind to our arrival at the Seattle airport. We got a Lyft to take us to our hotel. The driver was from Afghanistan and had an interesting background. For 10 years, he worked for the US military as an interpreter/translator. He was with forward fighting units who often went after high value targets to get intel. He said that the US government relocates people like him and their families to the US once their role is done. He came to the US, Jacksonville coincidentally, ahead of his family to get things set up. With the US pullout of Afghanistan, followed by Covid, his family has not been able to leave. The tried to leave from the Kabul airport last year when it was attacked by the Taliban. It's been 3 years. They are currently living in hiding in the country side near the Pakistan border, hoping they can move to the US via Pakistan, since that's not happening now in Afghanistan. Our driver decided to move to Seattle as the new home for his family, once they're able to leave, and is working many hours as a Lyft driver to make money. It was a sad and touching story.

The Apple Air Tags were mostly useful, but highly dependent on how close they come into contact with iPhones to report their location. While waiting in the Jacksonville baggage claim, I checked the status of the tags. Three of the 4 had updated and were showing as being in Jacksonville. The 4th hadn't updated in 1.5 hours and was last reported in Atlanta. All 4 bags showed up in JAX, so that 4th tag must not have passed as close to an iPhone as the other 3. We had our Global Entry cards with us. The agent who reprinted Micheline's boarding pass with the pre-check just checked her GE card. She found that Micheline's birth year was wrong on the booking and therefore didn't match what was on her GE card. Easy fix.