Losing a Day in the Southern Hemisphere

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Dateline: November 4^th, 2018, Equator, middle of the Pacific Ocean and…International Dateline

Losing a Day in the Southern Hemisphere

So today we cross the Equator from the northern hemisphere to the southern hemisphere. We are very excited. We have been told to be on deck at 12:30pm and look for the 25,000-mile string of orange cones. Have you seen these?

Since we are Shellbacks (having crossed the equator many times) we will not be part of the “Crossing of the Equator” ceremonies for “pollywogs” (those who have not crossed before). Onboard, Neptune presides over the ceremony where pollywogs are blindfolded and then told that they will be feeling things from under the sea and they use things like jello for jellyfish to scare them and finally tons of cooked spaghetti are poured over them…silly but fun to watch

Today it is 87 degrees and partially rainy and 100%!h(MISSING)umidity. In other words, hot and humid. Great for the skin ?. Clearly, we will cross again on the way home but at that time we will be in the air as we are flying home from Tahiti while the ship will take 8 days to go back to LA, we will take 8 hours on Air France.

Tomorrow we will cross the International Dateline and lose November 6^th. People on the ship who have a November 6^th birthday seem to be happy to skip a birthday! Two days later we will cross back to the east and find ourselves with two November 7ths ?.

So, something we didn’t know but maybe you do…is there is American Samoa (US Territory) on the east side of the International Dateline and the country of Samoa on the west side of the International Dateline. The dateline bisects them so that American Samoa is 1 hour closer to USA time and the country of Samoa which does business with New Zealand and Australia, is one hour closer to their time. We are visiting both in the next couple of days.

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