Back! Part 1 of 2 trip details

So we’re back.  We came home to happy kids, and a super clean house, and warm food.  Yes, my in-laws are incredible!  We had some recovery yesterday as we were trying to readjust back to our old time, and catch up from a night’s lost sleep on the plane.  Today Knut is back to work, and I guess you could say the same about me!  Although, I’m going through the 200+ pictures on my camera to pick the very best for here.  I’m about half way through and have picked 50 “very best” so I think I’m going to have to narrow it even more!

It might be easiest to share our fun times day by day.

Day 1:
We arrive in Honululu around noon.  The hotel sent a shuttle service to pick us up, and we were greeted with fresh flower leis that smelled soooo good, and warm Hawaiian hugs. 

The shuttle ride to the hotel was about an hour, as we were staying on Waikiki Beach.  I will admit that we were excited to be there, but I was struck in this city at the number of homeless people who were around.  We drove past several shelters under bridges, and saw people pushing shopping carts.  I hated being one of those people driving past all of that as fast as I could to our nice hotel.  I’ve heard this is common in many touristy places of the world, but I still didn’t like it.

The main reason we went to Honululu was to see Pearl Harbor.  We knew it was more urban than we were wanting, but we couldn’t pass up seeing it.  The main strip of Waikiki Beach is crowded with shops and people and has an overwhelming odor of sunscreen and delicious food.  We were told that we should try to avoid taking a nap the first day, so that our internal clocks would be adjusted as soon as possible to Hawaii time.  So even though we were tired, we walked along the strip of shops.  Shopping is not Knut’s thing at all, but we found some neat street performers and hula dancers, and ate some great foods from some farmers markets set up around there.  We headed to bed exhausted at 8pm, and I was surprised we couldn’t hold out any longer. 

Day 2:
We were wide awake at 5am, and realized that maybe I’m not lazy because I love to sleep in.  Maybe I’ve just been on Hawaiian time my whole life. 

This was our Pearl Harbor day.  We spent some time on our Ipad searching out info on how to get to the Harbor.  We heard it’s pretty simple to take the bus there and buy tickets.  However, we couldn’t find the bus map online anywhere!  We had asked the front desk the day before about getting to Pearl Harbor, and they pointed us in the direction of the tour companies.  We didn’t want to take a tour shuttle, though.  It was over $150/person.  It was a national monument, right?  Couldn’t we just show up there?  Knut and I are both the independent sort, and didn’t like the idea of moving at some tour company’s pace anyway.

So we looked at the Pearl Harbor site, and they also recommended that we go through a tour company, and gave no bus info.  So we took a second look at the tour companies, and saw that most tours left at 6:30am.  At that point, that was just 30 minutes away, so we decided to head downstairs to the tour company’s desk and ask more questions.  We were annoyed that it felt our hand was being forced to spend hundreds of dollars.

All the tour companies were still closed, but we found at the front desk at the hotel, the woman looked both ways and quickly handed us a bus map and told us which bus stop to walk to, and which bus number to take.  She said we should get there early as possible to get tickets to see the USS Arizona, as the tour companies buy them up early.  Knut and I referred to the tour companies as the “Hawaiian Mafia” from that point on.

It was about an hour and a half bus ride, but our bus driver was really fun, and talked football to Knut a lot of the time.  He was a big Pro-Bowl fan, and showed us so many things around the city that I don’t think we would have otherwise seen.  He told us about flea markets we shouldn’t miss, etc.  He told us about the church in Hawaii, and talked freely about his faith.  It was really fun.  Only $2.50/person round trip, too.

We got to Pearl Harbor, bought our entrance tickets, and got our tickets for the ferry to see the Arizona.  I think had we even been 30 minutes later, the ferry tickets might have been sold out for the day.

I didn’t get the best pictures of all the monuments, and inside the submarine and “Might Mo” battleship.  I had my 50mm lens on, and I should have picked a different one for that day, as we were so close up to everything, I wished I could have zoomed out more.

It was amazing, and totally worth it.  It was overwhelming.  When it was our turn to take the ferry out to the USS Arizona, that was the most overwhelming.  The memorial is over the sunken ship, with all those bodies still entombed inside.  We learned that it burned for 3 days after the attack.  We learned so much.  There were a handful of survivors from that ship.  Either they survived because they jumped from the ship and somehow swam through the burning oil in the water to safety, or they were on assignment on land or elsewhere that day. 

The wall inside the memorial, which we were only allowed 15 minutes to view because of the sheer volume of people who want to see it, had the names of all those entombed inside.  Then there was a small section of survivors who have died since the war, and have been allowed to be buried inside the ship.  I guess there are only a handful of survivors still living, but when one of them dies, navy divers bring their bodies down to the side of the ship, and they are placed about 10 feet inside so that they may be laid to rest with the rest of the ship.  On those days, the memorial is shut down for the day, and the family has the memorial open to them for a full military funeral.

I know I’m not using the right words, but the whole experience was so overwhelming.  We learned so much about why we went to war with Japan, something that I was never clear on.  What was interesting was that we toured it with many Japanese tourists right next to us.  They were as overwhelmed as we were. 

We didn’t wear sunscreen that day, as we were touring museums for the most part.  However, there was some walking outside, and I got my first sunburn of the trip on my chest.  Unfortunately, I was wearing a blouse with a lace border, and so I had a little lacy burn around my shoulders.  I was so mad about that because that was not the tan I was planning on returning home with.  I shouldn’t have worried, though.  It was just the beginning of our sun adventures.

Day 3
We spent a leisurely morning on the beach and hanging out at the hotel, and then our shuttle took us back to the airport around noon where we took a flight from the island of Oahu, to the island of Maui where we were going to spend the bulk of our trip.  Once we got there, we picked up our rental car, stopped by the grocery store to get some lunch food and snacks for the week, and a big package of water bottles.

My first impression of Maui was: eco-friendly.  There were windmills on the hills, sun panels on every rooftop, and paper bags at the grocery stores as plastic bags are banned on the whole island.  Also from our first view, it was much more dry and agricultural than we had thought.  Many parts looked like we were visiting my family in Arizona, and there were sugar farms, and coffee farms the whole way to our hotel.

Our hotel on Maui was amazing.  We stayed at the Ka’anipali Beach Hotel which Knut’s cousin had strongly recommended us to use.  It’s not one of the big chain hotels, but privately owned by actual Hawaiians.  The focus of the hotel is to engulf you in the Hawaiian culture, and they take that very seriously.  It felt like we were visiting our family in Hawaii.  Most of the staff was Hawaiian, and many spoke Hawaiian as their first language.  Everyone from the housekeeping to the restaurant had a teaching spirit and showed us things that I don’t think we would have noticed otherwise.  As we butchered their language, they kindly corrected us, as it’s almost impossible to even get directions places without pronouncing their words.  Every street name and location is a Hawaiian word that we had never seen before. 

The hotel does a hula show every night with music.  They explained that many hotels do dances that are not Hawaiian.  They are from Tahiti, or elsewhere.  They do whatever is flashy, but our hotel was very Hawaiian, and for them, hula dances were a family affair, not a tourist one.  Staff members of the hotel did the hula, and my favorite dancer of all must have been nearly 60 years old.  She was so graceful and smiled so big you could tell she was loving every movement that she had done since she was a child.

After the hula show, the band played some Christian worship music.  That, and the fact the hotel does a church service in the courtyard on Sundays, and the fact that there were copies of the Bible in our room in several languages (as opposed to our hotel in Honululu that had both the Bible and the teachings of Buddha) it lead us to believe that the owners of our hotel were probably Christians.

Even though we didn’t do much but travel and get set up for the week on this day, I felt exhausted from our big Harbor day the day before.  We determined that our next day would be laying around and doing nothing.

Day 4
We woke up lazily, and headed to the beach.  It was 9am when we got there, and I sat for about 30 minutes before I thought I should put sunscreen on, even though it was early morning.  Well, it was too late, because in that 30 minutes, my back and one of my legs got fried.  Let’s just say it doesn’t happen that fast where we live!  Even 30 minutes after I had sunscreen on, the heat was getting to me, and I went inside.  I covered myself in aloe, and Knut and I decided to drive to the closest town to see the famed banyan tree and look around.

The banyan tree was amazing!  It’s a type of tree that sends out these huge limbs, and then shoots down supports of those huge limbs to send roots out, and each of these supports looks like another tree trunk.  So it looks like 30+ trees all connected together by these huge limbs.  This one tree that was planted in 1870 covered a whole city block.  I have a better banyan tree picture when we were hiking, but this “urban” one was amazing!

There was a little quilt shop in the tourist village, and I wasn’t going to go in because the last thing I need right now is more fabric, but Knut pushed me in because he knew I would love to chat with the quilt lady in there.  Her quilts were beautiful, done in the traditional Hawaiian style.  She had several for sale that were hand stitched.  I was in awe over those.  She really enjoyed that because she said she got a lot of people saying how overpriced her hand stitched quilts were.  I didn’t think they were overpriced in the least, and I told he that, even though I had no intention of buying a quilt that day.  We chatted awhile about how people don’t understand the work that goes into something like a hand stitched quilt.  She noticed my burns, and told me to put some “Alo-eh” on it.  I was trying to understand her through her thick accent and said “Aloe?”  She smiled and said “Here in Hawaii, we pronounce every vowel.  We call it ‘Alo-eh'”  To me it sounded more like the Canadian way to say it than Hawaiian, but I kept that to myself.

We decided to buy a half-day sailing and snorkeling trip for the next day.  I’ll have to tell you all about the rest of our week next.  I took many, many more pictures in the last half of the trip as opposed to the first.  The first half was a lot of laying around and trying to remember what it was like to just do nothing.  They were our unwinding days.  It was so necessary.  Coming up are our day trip to Hana with tons of waterfalls, the story of our sailing trip, seeing the sunrise on a mountaintop, and yummy, yummy food.