World Cruise - What Happened To February 17?

We sat down the other day and went over our cruise itinerary again to decide on the smaller excursions we may want to take along the way. To help me visualize our trip, I took my wall calendar and began penciling in the ports and cruise days (days at sea). Everything was going along well until I got to February 17. There was no February 17 on our cruise itinerary!

Instead of February 17 there was a note that we cross the Dateline. Now we've done that lots of times before but never on a ship. It's a first!!

Every time we have crossed the Dateline it has been on an airplane and doesn't seem quite as jarring. Maybe it's because of the jet lag. Their will be no jet lag on this trip. That was one of the inviting details of this trip. We gain an hour through each time zone from Miami through the Canal and across the Pacific until we hit the dateline. Then we lose a day, February 17, but as we continue around the globe, we will gain those 24 hours back one hour at a time.

So I guess, in the end, we still have February 17. It's just that it is chopped up into twenty-four hour pieces and dispersed through the remaining seventy-five days of our trip. I'm  just glad my birthday isn't on the 17th of February!