Cruising The Pacific Ocean en route to Lautoka, Fiji – February 14

Valentine's coffee

Partly cloudy, at least one spot of rain, 29 degrees

HAPPY VALENTINE’S DAY!!

room service

Yesterday we learned that we will arrive in Fiji a day earlier than planed due to missing 2 stops (American Samoa and Samoa). Today we learned that we will be in the originally planned port of Lautoka, Fiji a day earlier than scheduled and the next day we will be in Suva, Fiji – this is a brand-new port. I can only imagine what a

main dining room menu, oh the choices

pain in the rear it is for the ship people who have to arrange this. We have also been told to expect the ship’s clearance (the procedure that takes place before we are able to disembark) to take 6 hours! Clearance procedures typically occur behind the scenes – I actually don’t really know how long they take; I do know that 6 hours is rare, if not unheard of. Clearance can include passport control, cleanliness inspection, health inspection etc. and actually starts days before calling on a port by providing the crew and passenger manifests. Rarely are guests

after dinner drinks, and petit fours

required to present themselves to immigration people on the ship – we did this in San Diego when the ship first arrived to the US, I suppose some passengers or crew may be required to see the immigration people, but I’ve never heard of any.

None of that means we have to do anything…yet. As soon as the ship’s tour people sort things out we will have to choose a new tour for the new port. Until then…nothing.

The rest of the day was spent as usual…doing very little. Sea days are great days to hydrate. With washroom facilities within close reach there’s no reason not to drink as much water as possible – assuming the ship’s toilets stay functioning.

lots of closet space

The afternoon was mostly spent with room service lunch and a movie…Midway. Normally, this type of movie wouldn’t be particularly interesting to me, but since we have just visited and learned about Pearl Harbor it was appealing. It was sooooo appealing that I fell asleep 3/4 of the way through…I’ll watch the rest some day.

Today was also laundry day. We’ve gotten into the habit of doing laundry about every 3 days. ‘Doing laundry’ for us consists of us filling a bag with dirty clothes, itemizing it on a list and plopping it outside our door…THAT’S IT!! Quite a luxury!

The ship doing our laundry is a perk (the only other one we use is multiple Wi-Fi logins) we receive for sailing with Regent for over 200 days. I have no problem doing my own

more storage

laundry and actually would prefer it if it wasn’t so hard to get into a laundry machine. There are complementary ‘laundrettes’ onboard, but in the past these have been hot commodities, so take a lot of time waiting for machines to be free and then for the wash and dry to finish. I’ve heard that there are a few number of rooms with en suite laundry machines…I’d LOVE this, but I suspect they are in the very top end suites, which we try to avoid. Anyway…as long as the bag is out before 9AM clothes are back by 9PM – they also come back pressed and folded or hung, other than some things like t-shirts they do a very good job. With t-shirts, they tend to come back larger than when they went in…I am convinced this is the ship’s way of making me feel that I haven’t gained any weight…I really think it’s because they don’t use

fill it up dirty and it comes back clean! magic!

a drying that shrinks everything back to their original size.

We were sailing at 5500 metres / 18000 feet / 5.5 km again…the deepest we’ve been along with a day out of Hawaii, I think.

Good to hear my teacher friends didn’t let me down and had a drink in my honour…and I had one for you.