Decided to ease into the vacation yesterday by just doing some historical site seeing - we went to the Arizona memorial and the Bowfin (submarine) museum. Well actualy we went to perl harbor naval station where the mountain of a marine with fire tattooed on both arms told us we might be in the wrong area. You know someone's a badass when they're talking politely to you and calling you sir and you still fear for your life. Semper fi baby. Anyway. The bowfin was quite cool and I got to check off "defile a national monument" from my life list of things to do. Okay so it wasn't really a national monument and wasn't so much defiling as jumping a barrier to get some shots of me behind the main bow guns, but I'm willing to count it as such. The arizona was nice though 50% of the national park rangers involved in running the memorial weren't. Once nice older lady tried to help us out and get us some extra time out on the actual memorial - we ended up with a block of tickets for two "show" times. Another family ended up needing them more and were talking to a different ranger, I offered the 'extra' tickets and the ranger became visibly upset that I would show such blatent disregard for the rules as to have tickets for TWO show times! she confiscated the tickets. No matter. The memorial was fantastic, several good shots, and I met a fellow from virginia who's been in port for 4 months working on retrofitting submarines. He recommended a couple of sites - including a dubious shrimp stand run out of the back of a van - it was nice to get the local perspective.
Back in waikiki it was lots of wandering around seeing walking plastic surgery advertisments (clue for you there barbie, perfectly spherical breasts don't fool anyone). I found some cool gear and good music in the billabong store, completely unnecessary but that's what vacations are fore. Finally we made our way to the beach for the open air movie. about 50 minutes after the movie was supposed to start another park ranger came around telling everyone that - oops - the movie was actually at a different beach. But don't worry, it's only 40 minutes by car to the beach. we skipped the movie.
A nice long night and now we're off to drive around the island. According to the guy from virginia (really wish I'd gotten his name) it should take about an hour and a half to drive plus however long we spend stopped. We'll get to see hunama bay, the pinapple and macadamia nut fields, cultural center and - most important to me - the northshore surf areas :)
Hanauma Bay is my favorite place on the whole island. I know you'll have fun. The USS Bowfin was the first sub I'd ever been on. When you get back, we shoud take a trip to Portland and tour the sub they have there (USS Blueback) docked at the Oregon Museum of Science and Industry. It's a cold war era sub, so you'll get to see the differences 35 years of technology makes on undersea warfare.
That'll be good to check out. Sadly no Hanauma bay just yet - see next post - but plenty to do.