Back at our winter home in Nevada. Getting home from Sydney, Australia, was a marathon slog. When we left the ship it was Sunday morning at 7:30 a.m. in Sydney. At that same moment the time here in PST was 12:30 a.m. on Saturday morning. Our plane took off around noon local.
Following a rough flight, with the seatbelt sign on much of the time, we landed in San Francisco at 6:30 Sunday morning. Our plane to Las Vegas left SF at roughly noon today, Sunday, and we disembarked at roughly 2 p.m. Getting luggage, connecting with our ride, and the trip home took another 2 hours.
All told, from when we left the ship until we got to our home here was roughly 28-30 hours. That is, if we’d started a stopwatch when we left the ship, and stopped it when we got home it would have shown that many hours elapsed, give or take a half hour.
Given the seven time zones we crossed plus gaining back the day we “lost” crossing the dateline at sea between Hawaii and Samoa, the calendar said we left today and arrived today. The whole thing happened on November 17, basically we lived the 17th twice and are that tired and jet lagged.
For years we did much of our flying on United, as its commuter line serviced our CA community airport. More recently I haven’t been impressed with United, I’ve liked Delta flights better. The tradeoff is that on Delta one often changes planes in Atlanta, not my favorite airport.
This flight was on United and was okay, no drama, everything worked. I watched the second new Dune film, rewatched Casablanca, saw one of the recent Mad Max films, the one to which Furiosa was a prequel, I think called Fury Road, with Charlize Theron playing the adult Furiosa and doing that hard-bitten part well.
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We enjoyed our cruise, and after the first 4-5 days reaching Hawaii, we had calm seas for the remaining 18 or so days. The ship was nice, well maintained, didn’t show its 20 year age. Our cabin was nice too, we were comfortable. I’d have rather been closer to midships as the walk to and from the dining room was long and, at my age, tiring.
Food was good, plentiful and varied. The WiFi worked well, nearly every time I used it. My only complaint was that it would sometimes drop me off and I’d have to click over and restart it, which always worked.
The entertainment was low-key, some good and some not. This I’ve come to expect with Holland America, their strengths lie in other areas. The library of movies on demand was nice and we watched several. The other DrC used the spa quite a bit, and liked it, as did the neighbor couple with whom we traveled.
We have frequent cruiser status with HA and that entitles us to free laundry services, a big plus which we used repeatedly. The 2 specialty restaurants did a nice job, and the dining room food was better than some lines deliver. We had very nice table mates at dinner, a congenial group of 4 Canadians: an 80s mother, her two 60s daughters, and the husband of one of those.
A real plus is that there didn’t seem to be a lot of respiratory illness - colds, flu, Covid - aboard. I saw few coughing or blowing noses. That’s a real plus as it is hard to avoid them if they are at all widespread.
We are at home until sometime in January when we may have a couple of short domestic trips, to CA and UT, those are still somewhat tentative.
