Well let me start by saying my DW and I have been on 14 previous cruises including Carnival, NCL, RCCL, HAL, and a couple of small lines. We are now nearing 50 and consider ourselves independent travelers. We have found reasons to like and dislike all of the cruise lines for various reasons and our tastes. Generalizations can always be tough but some of our impressions are Carnival is less elegant but more fun, we have loved NCL's freestyle dining but felt the service was weaker, HAL has great service, elegance, and food but an older crowd, and RCCL has ok food but excellent entertaining shows. We tend to like smaller more intimate ships but have had great fun on bigger ships as well. Due to mixed feelings about this cruise I decided to wait a couple weeks and see if my feeling about the cruise changed with time and it did get a bit better. Now, on to our Sept. 29 sailing on the, Pride of America.

We flew to HNL on 9-28 from the east coast, although our connection in ATL was perfect the 9-½ hour flight was extremely long and after 8 hours found ourselves counting the minutes. We landed in Honolulu tired but determined to do something productive. We picked up our Thrifty car without a hitch and proceeded to the west coast of Oahu. Tourist seldom visits this area but we find it quite peaceful and a pleasant change from Waikiki. We were basically scouting locations to snorkel from and we found a couple excellent areas. After dark these areas are thought to be somewhat questionable safety wise but I felt safe at several of the sites and found numerous military families using these sites as well. We finally ended up at our hotel, the Waikiki Sand Villas. This hotel borders the canal and is very old, while the price was right, and we only were there a day, that is all I would want to stay, very dirty and tacky, figuratively and literally.

The next day, prior to going to the ship we walked Diamondhead, a delightful hike, but a lot of steps, like 130 or so, took about 75 minutes each way with a nice stop at the top. We did get terribly sweaty and if we did it again we would have gone prior to checking out of the room and gone back for a shower. This would have been easily done since we were up early and the checkout of the room was 12. After the hike we stopped at the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific, Punchbowl, to honor those who served. We returned the car which was seamless and ended up at the ship by 2:30. We were on board in less then a half hour. Read more