The flight into Hawaii was nice and smooth. Nowadays there are very few positive experiences at airports and on aircrafts. We flew Delta and had a very positive experience. Jeff will differ on one item. He could not recline his seat. That normally isn’t such a big deal, but for a 5 ½ hour flight it makes a significant difference. Jeff swears that the guy behind him had one of those doo-dads they sell on TV that you just stick into the back of the seat in front of you somehow and it makes it to where the person in front cannot recline. We’ll never know. They actually fed us on that flight. Egg and cheese omelet, coffee, blueberry muffin, sausage link, juice. It was pretty good for airplane food.
We made it into Honolulu airport around 11 am. We found our luggage and no wine bottles were shattered during transport! We found an airport shuttle and headed to our hotel. Waikiki Parc Hotel in Honolulu, about 15 minutes away. Since our room wasn’t ready, we checked our luggage in with the porters and wandered around. We found a place called Waikiki Beachwalk which is just a foofey new strip of stores and restaurants (not on the beach at all). We ate at the Yard House. Nothing fancy, but they have about 40 beers on tap! We walked up and down the nearby streets, which reminded me a little of Rodeo Drive with high end stores. We made it back to the hotel and checked into our 15th floor room with a lovely view of the Pacific overlooking Waikiki Beach! We decided to change and go on down to the beach until the sun was too hot!
For dinner we had Coldstone ice cream and sat on the beach with our ice cream and watched the sunset. Boy was that fast too. Everyone is standing on the beach with their cameras ready because the sun is low in the sky. (By the way, all kinds of people still surfing). If you left to go pee, you’d have missed it! It was a matter of minutes where the sun was completely above the horizon until it was gone! Then the sky was a blaze of colors, it was awesome! We got some nice pictures of that. Oh and our chocolate devotion ice cream in a chocolate and sprinkle dipped waffle cone was awesome too. We walked around a little more and then headed to bed, it was a LONG day. A 29 hour day to be exact.
Day 2 started with breakfast in the hotel restaurant Nobu. It was French Toast for me and eggs and bacon for Jeff. We decided to wander off for a bit today and get out of Waikiki. Navigating the public transportation proved to be more of a nuisance than it was worth. Although we hear Hawaii has one of the best public transportation systems in the country (we were just beginners). Sparing the details it took us an hour to get to Pearl Harbor by city bus. Before this, I don’t think Jeff and I really appreciated exactly what occurred there in the harbor in 1941. They start the tour with a short video on what happened that day and then they take you by ferry boat out to the memorial. There were about 1000 people who lost their lives on the USS Arizona Battleship, which was attacked and sank right there in the harbor. They are still entombed there with their shipmates to this day. An amazing thing we noticed was a plaque that noted the individuals who survived the attack, but who later in life died and were subsequently buried in the Arizona with their fellow soldiers. It was a quiet and quick viewing of the memorial before they whisk you away. Moving is the only way to describe it.
After we finished our viewing we decided to take a taxi back to the hotel. The topics coming out of the mouth of the taxi driver were somewhat inappropriate. Too much talk about politics, women drivers, what race our president should be and so forth. The end of that cab ride couldn’t come fast enough. We had a dinner reservation at the Pacific Beach Hotel Aquarium restaurant. The ad made the place seem very nice and we schedule our reservation so we would be able to see the feeding of the stingrays and various fish. Turns out the restaurant was a buffet and not all that nice, which normally is fine, but we were expecting/hoping for something else. The aquarium was neat though. The feeding consisted of a scuba diver jumping into the tank, hand feeding a few fish, and then flashing happy birthday and happy anniversary signs to people eating by the window. The food was adequate and we made our way back. We strolled the beach and found a secluded spot were we could watch the stars and listen to music coming from a beachfront bar, which, by the way, played amazing song after amazing song, it was great.
No comments:
Post a Comment