We got up at 7.00am to find the Celebrity Eclipse at anchor, with the first of the liberty boats ferrying its first lot of passengers ashore. Today we were booked to go on a half-day excursion, and we had to assemble in the Eclipse Theatre to await the call for our group, which was group #17. Once the call came, we made our way down to Deck 2 and down the steps onto the pontoon to board the liberty boat. The weather was already hot and the sun beat down. This...

Woke up around 6.30am to see "land ahoy" as the Eclipse slowly made her way into port in Hilo. We went back to bed for an hour then got up and went out onto the balcony, to take in our immediate surroundings. As the Eclipse is such a large ship (over 122,000 tons) we found ourselves in quite an industrial port full of containers, with a large warehouse-like building serving as the passenger terminal. We didn't have any excursions booked today, preferring to do...

Got up at 7.30am and went out onto our balcony, where the weather was warm and sultry and the sun was already quite hot. Today would be our last full day at sea before reaching our first port of call tomorrow. As today was Hallowe'en, which is celebrated much more in the USA than it is at home, many passengers had adorned the doors of their cabins with paper decorations depicting ghosts, black cats, witches and pumpkins. Before leaving home I'd assembled a gre...

Got up at 7.30 this morning and were dismayed to see that the decks were wet, and it wasn't because the deck-hands had been washing them. After getting washed and dressed we made our way up to Deck 14 to take the route alongside the pool to the Ocean View café. There was a fine rain (what we called a 'mizzle', i.e. mist+drizzle) so we decided to take the slightly-longer way across, under the canopies for shelter. As we did so, the skies opened and the rain c...

Got up at eight o'clock this morning and went out onto the balcony to see what the weather was like. Once again, although dry, it was cooler than we'd expected and cloudy, but the Pacific Ocean was fairly calm as the Celebrity Eclipse glided through the waves, and we enjoyed the hypnotic shhhhh shhhhh of the sea washing against the side of the ship. We went and had our breakfasts in the Ocean View café and had a wander out on deck. Quite a few people were pow...