I’m not much of a birder. I love to watch the Great Lake Erie birds swoop by my porch on the north coast of Ohio, especially the eagles that have returned to the marsh near Old Woman Creek. They dive for fish in the waters outside my window. But I am a dunce when it…
Celebrity Century, a cruise ship that has spent most of its seagoing life in North America, is sailing around Australia and New Zealand this winter (summer in the Southern Hemisphere), getting a taste of what Aussies and Kiwis want to see and do on a cruise ship. The Century is Celebrity’s first major investment into…
At sea, a cruise ship captain sometimes invites a group of passengers to join him for dinner at his private table, which typically is large and well set, placed in the middle of the main dining room. Those occasions have diminished with the increased size of new ships. Most captains of big ships now eat…
The last time I traveled to Australia, in the mid-1980s, I remember being fumigated on the airplane – flight attendants running around the aisles and seats with bug balms, spraying hither and yon – before they let us out, wheezing onto the tarmac in Sydney. After six weeks of a recent trip to Australia and…
Mating grounds for the Northern Royal Albatross are reason enough to visit New Zealand’s Otago Peninsula, but these grand birds are not the only attraction on a shore excursion from the cruise ship port of Dunedin. Yellow Eyed Penguin (center) approaches a beach in New Zealand Above a wide beach with rolling ocean surf, our…
Preparing to meet a colony of Northern Royal Albatrosses — or are they albatri — I remembered an image from high school when my English class was studying Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s “Rime of the Ancient Mariner.” A sailor wore a dead albatross around his neck as penance. The poem is one of those prized pieces…
Antarctica remains elusive for me as a travel destination, but I’m getting closer. On my Celebrity Century cruise in Australia and New Zealand – from Sydney to Auckland with stops on the way – the ship rounded the bottom of New Zealand, East Southeast of Stewart Island. Our southern-most point was at the geographic coordinates…
After two days and three nights at sea from Tasmania on the southern tip of Australia, Celebrity Century plunged into Milford Sound at sunrise. You would not want to sleep-in on the day that your cruise ship slips through the three sounds on New Zealand’s southwest coast, not if you want to see Milford, anyway.…
Yes, in the picture above, the figures that look like ants at the top of Sydney Harbor Bridge, on either side of the flag to the left, are people. They are waving goodbye to my ship, the Celebrity Century, as it begins a 12-night cruise from Sydney, Australia, to Tasmania and New Zealand. More about…