Hawaii Cruise

My husband and I decided on a whim to go to Hawaii after coming across a deal to go on a 7 day cruise including airfare for $999.00 each. We were going to be in San Francisco, so instead of spending 8 days driving the PCH, we decided to go to Hawaii.

This was our first trip to Hawaii and I think cruising is a great way to see paradise.

We sailed on NCL, the Pride of America, Freestyle cruising. I want to speak a little about Freestyle cruising in case you would consider taking this trip. If you have never cruised before, you might never cruise again. Freestyle is kind of a way of saying we will serve the customer if we feel like it. If we don't you're on your own.

The upside of sailing NCL over other cruise lines is you start in Hawaii unlike other lines who start in California. You spend several days on the water before you see land. The accomodations are okay, the food is average (except for the fruit - pineapple, papaya, cantalope, honey dew melon are fantastic & you can certainly survive the week on that if nothing else is edible).  The other thing you should know about NCL is you will be charged $10.00 per person per day to tip your staff. I guess they figure with their service the way it is, you may not tip at the end of the week.

By traveling on a whim, we had no time in Honolulu, thus we did not see any of the sites of Oahu, except, the airport & ship terminal. We booked our airfare thru NCL because of the special. When we called to try to change to an earlier flight, they were going to charge us $300 each just to change plus a higher airfare, so we decided we would just go another time for that price.  I have a few photos of Honolulu from the ship, but this is all we saw of it.