27 Wednesday Nov 2024
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For days, stopping at one container yard after another, I had been yearning for Tahiti. I am plowing through Hampton Sides’ book, The Wide Wide Sea, about Captain Cook’s 18th-Century explorations of the South Pacific. His crew, grimy and horny, always looked forward to Tahiti with its wild exotic flowers, cooling waterfalls, fresh fruit, and half-naked girls. Besides, our ship was running low on fresh fruit, and Tahiti has the best pineapples ever.
Continue reading18 Monday Nov 2024
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beach, beaches, cruising, Dravuni Island, expat, South Pacific, travel
I was fifteen and on my first date. I took her to the movies, where “South Pacific” was playing, the room was dark, and love was in the air. I spent two hours and thirty-seven minutes trying to work up the moxie to put my arm around her. I never succeeded.
Continue reading16 Saturday Nov 2024
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american-samoa, expat, pago-pago, Samoa, South Pacific, travel
Samoa!!! All I ever associated with Samoa were the yummy Girl Scout cookies of the same name, laced with chocolate and coconut. Couldn’t wait to snag some from the source. We parked the ship in Pago Pago, the capital of American Samoa, which sounded like it should be paved with pricey resorts and ringed with pink sandy beaches. Turns out, that place is …. Bora Bora. We’re not going there.
Continue reading09 Saturday Nov 2024
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One of the first things we were told upon boarding the ship was to turn our phones to airplane mode. Really? We paid for Internet access!
The next thing we were told was to log into the ship’s proprietary internet service, which – for reasons I still have yet to understand – works fine, even with airplane mode on.
Alas, lots of things we’ve come to expect do not work fine. Text, for example. And phone calls.
And the phone’s display of the correct time.
Continue reading08 Friday Nov 2024
We wondered what would happen on a cruise ship on election day. Tricolor cupcakes? Food fights? Flag burning?
Continue reading02 Saturday Nov 2024
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Cruise, cruise-news, cruising, expat, Grand Princess, Princess Medallion, princess-cruises, travel
We are aboard the Grand Princess! This is the oldest ship in the fleet, and back when it was launched in 1998 it was the fastest and the biggest Princess. Now it’s the smallest, which you’d never know if you were doing 3300 steps per day just getting from the putting green to the spa and back to the stateroom. It’s quite beautiful with its wooden moldings and pretty lattices. It doesn’t look the least bit like Donald Trump’s gilded rococo apartment, as some newer ships do.
Continue reading31 Thursday Oct 2024
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29 Tuesday Oct 2024
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04 Friday Oct 2024
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There was an ad somewhere on the Internet, it saw me coming and took up residence on my screen. “A 33-day cruise in the South Pacific for $3,250,” it said. A month in the South Pacific! Polynesian girls delivering umbrella drinks on sandy beaches! Sign me up!
Continue reading28 Thursday Oct 2021
Posted in Travel
My mother loved champagne. She smoked cigarettes in an extravagant holder, crossed her long legs (she was proud of those legs!), and ordered first my dad, then after he died, me, to uncork a bottle of “the stars!” (As Dom Pérignon was said to have exclaimed: “Come quickly! I am tasting the stars!”) It’s a tradition I perpetuate: drinking the stars.
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