Boats at the port of Tauranga, New Zealand. We have so many fond memories of our three months in this beautiful country.

“Sighting on the Ship in Australia”

Glass sculpture in hallway.

The second leg of this 33 night cruise is our 16th cruise in four years, averaging at one cruise every three months.  That’s not to say we’ve booked cruises for such an arbitrary schedule as four per year. It’s just an average.

During our first year of world travel, we embarked on eight cruises in a little over five months. Then, we had a 14 month gap with no cruises at all.  From there, we slowed down a bit to the current total of 16 cruises. 

While taking this photo I thought, “Hmm…this looks familiar.” We’ve only taken about 10,000 photos since taking this shot. It would be easy to forget.

We book cruises when we find good deals with lots of perks in locations convenient to where we are at any given time. Different from many cruise enthusiasts, we don’t necessarily focus on new ports of call we’ll visit, although this is of interest to us.

Instead, we focus on our joy of cruising and using a ship as our temporary home for a few weeks and in this case, for over a month. Sure, the cost for cruising generally exceeds our preferred average daily cost of around US $200, AU 268, including vacation rental fees, transportation, visas, food, insurance, entertainment, Internet and miscellaneous.

Forest along the seaside in Tauranga.

In five days, we’ll be sharing our total expenses for this 33-night cruise, including average daily costs, our final cruise bill for both legs and any incidentals we may have purchased along the way. Please check back for these totals.

After our change in course, due to inclement weather, the last week’s cruise itinerary has changed dramatically. Today, we’re in Tauranga, New Zealand during which a funny thing happened to us. Well, it was funny to us anyway.

The town of Tauranga, New Zealand.

“Tauranga total population

• 114,789 people usually live in Tauranga City. This is an increase of 10,905 people, or 10.5 percent, since the 2006 Census.
• Its population ranks 6th in size out of the 67 districts in New Zealand.
• Tauranga City has 2.7 percent of New Zealand’s population.”

After four days at sea, passengers were chomping at the bit to get on land. We never mind sea days.  The ship has been our home for this month and we’re happy whatever we’re doing, wherever we dock.  It’s not unlike our daily lives. 

Not only are we grateful and enjoying the exciting days, we’ve found the quiet and mundane days to be enjoyable in their own way, as is the case for many of you. Not every day has to be emblazoned in our minds as highly memorable.

Shipping yard in Tauranga.

With today’s port of call of Tauranga, we decided to get off the ship. I took a few photos from our balcony early this morning. Neither of us were hungry, so we decided to skip breakfast and eat later if we’re hungry.

As always, we set up our laptops in our usual Latte tudes Café on the fifth deck where we are often able to find comfortable seating with enough activity in the background to further entertain us while we work on the day’s post.

As we walked toward the port exit, everything started looking familiar.

This morning, we met with Kevin, the ship’s activity director, to discuss a possible Part 2 of yesterday’s successful seminar. He’d received lots of positive feedback from passengers wanting to hear more of our story.

Of course, we’re flattered to hear this including all the positive feedback we received all day yesterday and again this morning after yesterday’s “event.” We couldn’t be more pleased that our seminar was a success. 

A seagull hoping for a morsel from tourists.

Now, we’re scheduled to conduct Part 2 in two days, another sea day, and we hope for yet another good turnout. What a great opportunity for us! This morning instead of preparing the post, we created the new agenda and we’re comfortable with the content.

Since this information is so readily available in our minds no rehearsal is required, only the agenda to refer to on my laptop during the presentation. No stress.  No worries. We’re totally at ease with the entire process.

Once we completed the agenda, we decided to postpone preparing the post and head out to see Tauranga. It’s cool here today, so we bundled up in jeans and parkas planning to spend a few hours visiting the town, a not too distant walk from the port.

Here’s another of New Zealand’s beautiful skies.

Once we entered the port exit gate, we looked at one another and laughed aloud. We walked this entire town in January when our then ship visited this same port of call. Somehow we’d both forgotten we’d already toured this charming town. 

Cold and windy, we turned around and returned to the ship, but not before we took today’s several photos.  There was no point in spending too much time in a port of call we’d already explored at length.  Here’s the link to our original visit in January, 2016.

Once back on board, we busied ourselves working on today’s post and photos and so on, when done, we may just make a stop at the Windjammer Café on deck 11 for a light bite to eat.

We hope all of our family, friends/readers in the US had a wonderful Thanksgiving holiday and warmest regards to all of your throughout the world. Thanks for hanging with us through this lengthy cruise

 Photo from one year ago today, November 28, 2015:

The beach along this area in Fiji was mostly rocky. For more details, please click here.