I’ve crossed the Atlantic three times, and I can say from experience it’s a big ocean. But it pales in comparison to the Pacific, which is twice as big, covering nearly 1/3 of the surface of the earth.

On October 3, we flew from Seattle to Hawaii to board the Royal Princess for a trans-Pacific cruise, destination: New Zealand.

This repositioning cruise was billed as a “17-day Tahiti, Hawaii and South Pacific Crossing,” scheduled to depart from Honolulu, stopping at Kona, then Pape’ete and Mo’orea in French Polynesia, Pago Pago in American Samoa, and Tauranga, New Zealand, before our disembarkation at Auckland.

[As it turned out, our stop in Pago Pago was cancelled due to weather.]

We were assigned a room on the 15th deck and from our balcony we watched the container ships arriving in Honolulu Harbor as we waited to cast off.

The Royal Princess is a huge cruise ship. She was launched in 2012 and refurbished in 2018. With 19 decks, she is over 200 feet high, nearly 1/4 mile long, and can carry 3,560 passengers and 1.346 crew members. It’s a floating city.

Here’s a picture of the Big Island of Hawaii as we approached Kona on the morning of Saturday, October 5:

There are three pools on the Royal Princess and since the sky was mostly clear and the temperature warm, many of the passengers spent their days sunbathing on the deck above ours.

We had five full days at sea after leaving Kona, which we spent exercising in the onboard gym, reading and wandering about the ship. Notice the “flying” walkway on the pool deck, below:

Days at sea were indistinguishable from one another, with one exception, October 8, the day we crossed the equator.

Since time immemorial, it has been customary for sailors to suffer an initiation ceremony to celebrate their first “line-crossing” of the equator, typically with King Neptune leading the hazing.

In the case of the Royal Princess, the ceremony involved being covered with jello and spaghetti noodles. We opted not to participate, but they certified our line-crossing anyway.

The journey from Hawaii to French Polynesia was smooth and storm-free. Here’s the view from our balcony:

Meanwhile, back home in Florida, the weather wasn’t quite so nice.