Back from Hawaii

Although I have been back from Ted Hierl's cruise to Hawaii aboard the Golden Princess for a few weeks, I finally got my pictures organized. At the bottom of this posting, I have a short slideshow with a sampling of what we saw & did on the cruise. But to see all the pictures and you will go to the Hawaii Cruise page. There are 3 slideshows and instructions of how to download pictures to your computer for free.

Reiner Kirsten put on some great shows. This Schwarzwald native warmed up the audience with some old favorites and introduced them to his new hits. Reiner mingled with the people on the cruise even when he was not performing and soon when you heard him say "Hallo Freunde" there was someone else saying "Hallo Reiner".

The Elstertaler, led by Wolfgang Semmler, again provided 2 show nights of dance music. However one of the highlights was when Semmi sang to his lovely wife, Ilona. He changed the words to the song to address their 12 years together and this year they were married. The Elstertaler really had the place jumping and you can see why Ted Hierl invites them back each year. Andre is a very talented singer and knows what the crowd wants to hear. They also brought with them some of the new hits in Germany and had everyone up on their feet. One morning, Tomas, on the keyboard, joined us for breakfast with this family. Tomas also plays in the new band that accompanies Stefan Mross and it was very interesting getting some inside stories from him.

We were lucky to have a great table of 6 other people to sit with at dinner time. Our table was very mixed with each couple coming from a different state: California, Minnesota, Rhode Island and, of course, Wisconsin. It was fun to hear what everyone had done throughout the day and some of them had some interesting adventures mixing with the locals. There was a table of people from Milwaukee and it was nice to see familiar faces on the cruise as well.

Ted Hierl and his lovely wife, Hilde, deserve a great big thank you for spending countless hours putting together this cruise. There were over 360 people in our group and 88 of them came from Germany. Hilde did all the coordinating and translating that was needed to make things go smoothly. Ted announced that next year's cruise will be going to the Southern Caribbean with the Original Naabtal Duo as the star guests. I have created a new Cruise page with all the details and you can get there by pressing this button . If you want to see the Naabtal Duo in action there are a bunch of links to YouTube so you can get familiar with their music. I will be putting a direct link along the left sidebar of the webpage soon, so if you are thinking of going next year call & reserve your cabin before they are filled up. Please note that if you click on Ted & Hilde's picture you will go to Ted's Webpage where you can listen to his 2 hours Sunday Radio show all week.