HILO

We were awakened this morning about 6 am by the ships emergency alarm sounding.  The same one that can precede an abandon ship order.  Once we were wide awake there was (my words not theirs) an "Opps, false alarm - sorry, never mind" type of announcement.  We were about an hour out of Hilo when this happened insuring that we would be out on our veranda to watch our arrival.

We eventually decided to each go our own ways today.  Having been to Hilo before Arlyene and I had our sights on a point of land we could see from our stateroom where there was some nice breaking surf on the rocks.  Our plan was to walk there.

However once we were off the boat we discovered that our planned route was along a busy highway without a safe shoulder to walk on an even if we tried we would have our backs to the heavy traffic on the way back.  So, we decided to just head in the direction of Hilo and make it up as we went.  At one point, in a park, we were able to see the ship back behind us.

Taken next to a very old Banyan Tree

Shortly after taking this photo we ran into Mike and Kimberly walking towards us on their way back from heading in closer to Hilo.  We turned around with them and ended up in a funky little restaurant on the edge of a lagoon and had a cold beer before returning to the ship.  For us the total distance was just a little over 4 miles.  They had walked farther.

We are now back aboard relaxing with a cold drink and awaiting our planned 6 pm departure.  We are schedule to cruise near the Kilauea Volcano for a bit before we start south for Fanning Island which is a couple days and about 1000 miles away.  So about 3 sea days to go.  We will cross the international date line.  I have already given up trying to keep track of what day this is in the overall 28 day cruise.  It's just Saturday today........

.....and this will likely be our last day with good cell phone and internet coverage.  From here on we will be dependent on the ship's systems to make posts and keep our e-mail  up to date.  This system is totally satellite of course and subject to some areas of poor coverage so there may be gaps in our updates.