Quote:
Originally Posted by DCLFAN
HI Gazelle2,
How was your Pride of America cruise in Hawaii? We are leaving July 2. any tips. Our major concern is excursions. Any deals on the islands without doing the ships excursions. Currently we are renting a car in Oahu and Maui. Should we rent in Kona, Kauai or Hilo? Any other helpful hints would be appreciated.
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Sorry it has taken so long to reply to your questions but we are pretty bad about posting after our cruises.
I am also sorry that I can't be of much help concerning your questions about rental cars because we pretty much restrict ourselves to doing ships' excursions for our journeys ashore.
One of the main problems with our cruise was that early May is the very end of the rainy season in Hawaii and we had rain on every one of our eleven days in the islands.
We enjoyed our cruise very much and found that, despite all of the horror stories we have read on this forum concerning the poor service on the American-crewed Norwegian ship in Hawaii, our service was absolutely faultless. The ship was beautiful and tasteful. Our only real onboard complaint came from the fact that there in no showroom band and no dance troupe. We are primarily Carnival cruisers and enjoy their professional musical and dance shows in the evening.
We enjoyed the islands of Hawaii and Kauai much more than either Oahu or Maui. The only other disapointment on the cruise was due to something over which Norwegian had absolutely no control. We were very proud of the fact that, through a lot of research, we decided to book an oversize balcony high up on the starboard side of the ship. That was to assure that we had the maximum possibility of viewing the lava flow from Kilauea during the scheduled night passage of the south coast of Hawaii as the ships sails between Hilo and Kona. Unfortunately, at the same moment that the disastrous quake hit Japan on March 11, 2011, Kilauea stopped erupting. Therefore, despite our anticipation of the viewing of the glowing lava flow, the flow has stopped and Norwegian cancelled the night time sail by.