Two Days In Honolulu

    See the last two days' posts.
    So, then, we arrived in Honolulu late Tuesday evening.
    We had to wake up early on Wednesday morning - but not as early as we ended up waking up on our own anyway, Tom and I being both so double jet-lagged first from the Columbus to  L.A. flight, then a couple days later from the late-in-the-day L.A. to Honolulu flight.
    Anyway, we needed to be ready early for an all-day tour of Pearl Harbor.

...with E'noa tours.

   

   There were 26 people taking the tour, and during the ride from Waikiki out  to Pearl Harbor our tour guide, a super-nice guy named Warren,  gave us a detailed and interesting lecture on the history of Hawaii as well as the history of Pearl Harbor.

   Pearl Harbor is quite a massive operation, with over 5,000 people visiting everyday.

    At the visitors' center we visited the museums and saw a film on the history and bombing of Pearl Harbor.   Then we took the ferry out to the memorial of the battleship Arizona, constructed over the sunken remains of the Arizona.

   
    Views from the ferry to the Arizona memorial:

    After our visit to the Arizona we returned to the visitor's center to grab a quick lunch

...of a turkey sandwich and a diet coke, which I have, by the way, sworn off swearing off (see post from 6/11/2015), though I have managed to cut back from my Diet Coke heyday.

    After lunch we drove out to visit the battleship Missouri.

Completed in 1944, The "Mighty Mo" was the last American battleship ever built. But it hasn't been used for that purpose for many decades and is now strictly a museum piece.

    We were given a tour of the ship by a very knowledgeable and enthusiastic guide.

    In the plaza in front of the ship was a statue of the famous kiss between a sailor and a nurse upon the announcement of the end of World War II.

Tom and I tried to recreate the famous moment, but we didn't quite have the composition down.  Still, it was a pretty good kiss.

    During the tour Tom and I hit it off with another couple, Joe and Janet.  Joe is a retired state  worker and Janet a retired teacher. They're from suburban Philadelphia and it turns out that Janet grew up in Northeast Philadelphia not far from where I grew up.They have six children, so between the subject of their kids and ours, Janet and I found endless topics to cover.  They were really nice folks.

    After the Pearl Harbor tour Warren drove us around Honolulu, showing us the Iolani Punchbowl, a military cemetery set in the crater of a volcano, and the famous statue of King Kamehameha.

    Then our tour was over and Warren dropped all us tourists off at our respective hotels.
    Tom and I finished the day with dinner at the Koko Cafe and a walk along the beach (see  post from 4/2/2015).
   
    Yesterday, Thursday, morning, our last day in Honolulu, we decided to venture off post for breakfast. A few blocks from our hotel we found a great little hole-in-the-wall place called  The Seaside Grill.
   

Tom had the $4.99 pancakes, eggs, and bacon special, but I went all Hawaiian and had the coconut pancakes with coconut syrup platter.  The food was soooo good.

And the staff was really friendly, too.

      After breakfast Tom visited a military museum next to the hotel while I returned to the lobby of the Kale Hoa to lounge about for a while.
    In the afternoon we decided to attempt to hike up to the top of the extinct volcano Diamond Head,

visible here in the background from Waikiki Beach.

   

We took the city bus out to Diamond Head State Park.

   
    It was a 'way steep hike, but we made it to the top.

View of Waikiki from Diamond Head.

...and back down again.
    On our way back down we saw a sight we'd never seen before:

A blue stop sign.

    After we returned to Hale Koa it was time for dinner so we went back to the Koko Cafe for the out-of-this world buffet.

This time I went with the meat-stuffed eggplant parmesean, boeuf bourginnone, tri-color potatoes, cauliflower a la polonaise and honey butter glazed carrots with macadamia nuts.
Don't ask how good it was.
Tom and I have decided the Koko Cafe has the best food we've ever eaten. And we've eaten a lot of food.

    After dinner we of course hit the dessert and ice cream sundae bars again.

    I washed it all down with a couple of ice teas with lemon and pineapple

After dinner, though we were tired-out from our hike up to Diamond Head and pigged-out from the feast we'd just consumed, Tom and I decided to waddle out to the beach just so that we could say we spent at least a few minutes on Waikiki Beach.

We figured we must be the only people in the world who come to Honolulu and spend no real time on the beach.

    But then, of course, we had only two days to spend in Honolulu.  Next time, we told each other, we'll spend more time on the beach.
    In truth we hope there will be a next time.  Because in just two days we've come to love Honolulu the place and especially the kind, friendly people.
    But now it's 4:45am on Friday morning and we are sitting for the last time on this trip in the beautiful lobby of the beautiful Hale Koa Hotel on the most beautiful army post in the world waiting for our Speedi Shuttle to pick us up and take us to the airport where we'll catch an inter-island flight.
    Next stop, Kauai.

Honolulu.