At the end of 2018, we left Hawaiʻi. We moved there in June 2016, with plants to stay for five to ten years (or longer), but various things prompted a move back after only two-and-a-half years.
When I say the end of 2018, I literally mean the end of 2018 . . . we left the Big Island late on the 28th, and the 29th found us in Long Beach, CA.
As is my wont, I don’t typically announce trips ahead of time, so the first hint came via a passing comment in Post No. 260 of my Project 313 effort (the post explaining the project is HERE).
Here’s the thing with that move . . . the original plan was to be gone from The Big Island for three months (something to do with the lease in the condo we were renting), and we had decided it was cheaper to send the car back to the mainland as opposed to renting one for three months. But that meant we had three weeks before the car would arrive on the mainland. So we booked back-to-back cruises covering those weeks.
Then, we got a call from Princess Cruises, asking if we would mind swapping the first cruise for a cruise at a later time (that first cruise included New Year’s Eve, and they overbooked). And that’s how we ended up in Long Beach for a whole week before going on our scheduled Panama cruise.
Why am I explaining all this?
Because I’m starting the effort of documenting those three weeks.
Why did it take so long?
Because it’s a daunting task . . . during the week in Long Beach, I snapped — counting both the Note 8 and P900 photos — a total of 1,050 photos and a number of videos.
That’s just the first week . . . the Panama Cruise — again combining Note 8, D7000, and P900 photos — saw me pressing the shutter button a whopping 3,700 times and recording over 100 videos.
I won’t lie to you; it will take some time to document those three weeks. Heck, the 2017 Alaska cruise photos took nearly four years from the first to the last post. I’m hoping to be a tad faster with this effort, but I ain’t committing to anything.
Part of the problem isn’t that there are many shots from around the Long Beach waterfront, like the above, or the Long Beach Aquarium . . .
. . . or Queen Mary museum . . .
. . . and that there’s a narrative that goes along with the photos. It’s also the fact I snapped ‘duplicate’ photos (Note 8 and P900), and it’s sorting through them to find which version is better and with which processing.
And that’s just for the first week.
Mind you, I’ve already documented some stuff during the week we were in Long Beach. For instance, a piece about the joys of traveling in First Class (something that now is prohibitively expensive). That post is HERE, for them who care to read my brilliant writing from before my writing started going went downhill.
And while posts with a narrative were not convenient, I’ve already shared some of the photos (HERE and HERE). I even did a “regular” post of the New Year’s fireworks show (HERE).
However, as mentioned, those were mostly dumps of photos sans narrative . . . so I now have to figure out what I want to include and expand on in these posts.
Complicating matters is that I also tried sharing stuff during the cruise (a painful experience from a time when the Internet on cruise ships was in its infancy and abysmally slow).
Because of that, many photos posted were in a smaller-than-usual format and will likely have to be reprocessed and reposted.
If it’s not clear yet, I’m starting a series of posts that might take a while to complete . . . and then I have the 2019 cruise to document.
Hopefully, I’ll live that long.
That’s it. This post has ended . . . except for the stuff below.
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