Back in Maui

Today had an ominous start to it.  The ship was sitting at anchor just off the island of Maui, just like it was supposed to be.  The cruise director came on the intercom as expected but the announcement was surprising.  The port authority which is in charge of the ship operations while in port, in this case our first tender port where the ship is anchored offshore and uses its lifeboats to move passengers between the ship and shore, was not ready for our arrival.  It was expected to be a couple of hours before they would actually be able to accommodate us.  We decided to eat breakfast in the dining room since we were in no hurry as the tenders would start by removing people who were signed up for ship tours first.  We saw whales from our breakfast seat.  I went to the deck to do some phone checking and found passengers were abuzz trying to figure out how the delay could possibly have happened.  (answer to this later) Something was definitely up according to these passenger sleuths.  The hair holding the sword of Damocles was fraying badly (you’ll have to look it up like I did) I was up on deck when one arrived with the news. “They are making a big change in the itinerary.  We’re going back to LA.”  How do you know?  “I asked.  One girl at the desk knew about it, and the other hadn’t heard yet.”  The sword of Damocles seemed to have fallen.  We had sort of been waiting for it to fall for quite a while.  I returned to our room to share the information such as I had with Jen.  We decided there was nothing to be done about it until it was officially announced.  We prepared ourselves to go onshore and the announcement came as expected that the port authority had arrived and that the tenders were starting.  We heard a knock at our door, and there was our room steward with a letter and pamphlet.  “I wanted to make sure you got this.”  The first sentence in the letter felt like a physical blow.  The trip was not ending.  It would return to LA after completing our visit to the French Polynesian Islands then would continue south to Mexico, then back through the Panama Canal, through the Caribbean to Miami, then across the Atlantic to the Mediterranean and the Baltic before returning to New York as scheduled.  Massive change, but not the end.  We did not take much time with the full itinerary or the particulars.  We were ready to go art shopping.  Lahaina, Maui is where we started our more serious art collecting thirty years ago when we were headed for our two years in China.  Back then we found a beautiful piece of art unlike anything we had seen before, and because we had sold off our stuff before leaving for China we had some money so we bought it and sent it to a neighbor in the US. 

We got our ticket for the tender, the ship’s way of maintaining control of numbers and the potential crowding associated with loading the relatively small lifeboats, and waited for about 15 minutes for our ride.  The galleries did not disappoint.  We saw a number of works by masters including Rembrandt, Erte, Dali, Picasso, Chagal, Durer, and more.  We learned that Anthony Hopkins, yes that Anthony Hopkins, is an artist of sorts and we found the sole gallery that sells his art (very colorful and quite abstract).  We saw a recently purchased piece on display that cost four million dollars.  We had a great time as we perused gallery after gallery.  Alas, the gallery which started it all for us is no longer here.  We did find one displaying works by the artist we have most recently purchased, back in the summer of 2019.  We still like his stuff.  Thanks for helping us hang it at the lake house, Kirby and Randy. 

After walking the streets for several hours we found our way back to the pier and back to the boat to ponder the future of our cruise.  The port authority problem turns out to be totally unrelated to the sea change in our itinerary except in a tangential fashion.  The single person tasked with the direction of the port traffic turns out to have been sidelined by Covid so they had to fly a person with his authority in from another island.  The bad omen just happened coincidentally on the same day they had planned to inform the ship about the massive changes ahead.