We started the New Year quietly in the park but we did see a few fireworks going off here and there. The first couple of weeks of January we spend relaxing, finishing up doctor appointments and enjoying evenings in the hot tub. A few days before we left for our cruise Brett's mom (Bridget) came and camped at the campground with us. She is enjoying her little Siesta and stopped to see us on her way to "the valley" to visit her mother. She never comes with empty hands and this trip was no different - several dozen chocolate chip cookies as well as oatmeal cookies and pickled eggs for Brett.
Mid month we left Lake Conroe and drove the coach over to my good friend Stan's to park for the two weeks we were gone on our cruise to Hawaii on Carnival Miracle, January 14-29, 2017 round
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| Picture courtesy Leon Kirby - Port Long Beach |
Would love to say the cruise was great but this one was just not all we had hoped. It was January after all and January in the Pacific can be touchy as well as chilly. Hawaii itself was great - Susan had never been so it was nice to be able to share the island adventures with her. Weather prevented us from making two of our ports so we did not see Nawiliwili, Kauai or Hilo on the big island.
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| Spiny Silversword |
up to Haleakala Crater ttps://www.nps.gov/hale/planyourvisit/summit-area.htm to see the sunset at 10,000 feet. The view was indescribable and pictures do not do the experience justice. If we ever make it back to Maui we will plan to schedule a sunrise visit to the crater and we will most assuredly take jackets as IT GETS COLD AT 10,000 feet!! LOL! While at the crater we did see several Spiny Silversword plants - the only place in the world they are known to grow is at Haleakala Crater. This amazing plant lives anywhere from 3-90 years or more but they only bloom once in their lifetime and once they bloom, they die.
We were blessed to have wonderful tour guides while on Oahu - Norm and Michelle Gann were great! We started the day off by watching the inauguration on Fox News before we walked to the Ala Moana Regional Park Beach https://roadtrippers.com/us/honolulu-hi/places/ala-moana-regional-park where Susan put her feet into the Pacific Ocean for the very first time and where we met up with Norm and Michelle. They then spent the rest of the day driving us from
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| Norm, Michelle and Brett |
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| USS Missouri |
Pearl Harbor and tours of the USS Bowfin http://bowfin.org/ submarine and museum, the USS Missouri https://ussmissouri.org/#, and a view of the Arizona (tickets were sold out so we were only able to see it from shore but the sight was still humbling to say the least)! We also had a great late afternoon lunch and of course a few beers. Thank you again Norm and Michelle for helping to make our time in Hawaii enjoyable - it truly was the best day of our trip! Unfortunately by the end of the day my back started to protest so we had to end the day rather abruptly. Feeling rather bad about this we informed our guides they could just "let us off here" and we would walk the last few blocks to prevent them from having to deal with pier traffic. Thankfully they declined as we arrived at our pier only to find our ship was GONE, and to be informed that it had relocated to another pier and due to weather we would be staying an additional day in Honolulu! So thanks again Gann Family for sticking with us and "going the distance" to get us to our relocation destination!
Day 2 in Honolulu was a bit less exciting but we know how to find fun. We made a few early morning calls to find out the bus schedule and made our way down to Waikiki. It may have been a wet drizzly day but the bar on the beach at the Halekoa http://www.halekoa.com/ was open for business! Guess where we spent the day?
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| Borrowed clip-art |
Honolulu to Kona? Let's say it was a pretty good one and I have been in some pretty good ones...lol We had winds overnight in the mid 90MPH range and seas 25-30 feet. Cruise ships are not designed for those conditions as they are very top heavy. Needless to say it was a bouncy night, awww but I slept like a baby.
Stop 2 was at The Painted Church, http://www.thepaintedchurch.org/default.asp which is a historical Roman Catholic church built in 1899 and painted by a priest with no professional training and a very limited budget. His labor of love and devotion took years to complete. The church has ongoing efforts to continue to preserve this quaint beauty and donations from tourist go toward aiding in the preservation/restoration efforts. I know our catholic friends will find this interesting but anyone who enjoys history is likely to enjoy it as well.
Our 3rd and final stop of the historical tour was at Pu’uhonua o Honaunau https://www.nps.gov/puho/index.htm. We could have easily spent hours enjoying this stop. The good and the bad of booking an excursion - Good: you see lots of stuff quickly, Bad: you see lots of stuff quickly.
We ended up spending two days in Kona due again to bad weather but we opted to stay on the ship the second day as we were only scheduled to be in port half of the day and had no interest in shopping at the time. While we were in Kona we did receive the new that we were expecting a kitten! Well, actually we were informed that the expectant mother had delivered six kittens so we would get one around the first of April.
We were a bit bummed that we did not get to go to Hilo as we had scheduled an all day trip to see the Hilo Chain of Craters (volcanos) and the famed Lava Tube! I don't know if we will make the journey back to Hawaii anytime in the near future but if we ever do, we have seen a peek of what there is to see and have a LONG LONG list of things we would still like to do there. Maybe Susan can get her professional license in Hawaii and then get a contract job there for a few months.
There was a short stop over in Ensenada Mexico and while it was another adventure, it was the mandatory foreign port for this cruise and just another tourist trap in our opinion. Don't get me wrong, it was an interesting stop just not a place we will put on our "have to see again" list.
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| Partial list of delays due to protest |
We finally arrived back in Long Beach on January 29th and spent the night in LA for an early flight back to Texas on the 30th. Did someone say something about protestors? Grrrr.... not even going to go there other than to say the airport and traffic into and out of the airport and the surrounding areas was a MESS!
The 30th found us overnighting at http://www.aggielandrvpark.com/ in College Station. We were just too tired (and not feeling well) to go any further - even the extra 75 minutes it would have taken us to get to Thousand Trails Lake Conroe was just too far.
But on the 31st we were up bright and early, or at least we were moving by mid-morning and on the road by 11 for the short trip back to Thousand Trails Lake Conroe for a much needed bit of relaxation and recuperation.
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| This is where we head to relax - our "home park" Lake Conroe |
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