I had today off so we were free to explore however we chose and didn’t have to be back at any particular time for a lesson which was nice. Karen had expressed interest in visiting Pearl Harbor so we invited her to join us for the visit to the USS Arizona memorial. We met her there and were treated to a brilliant rainbow over the harbor as we waited our turn for the tour out to the USS Arizona.

I can’t do justice to explaining how somber and emotive the memorial site was so I won’t try and instead, I’ll leave it up to you to imagine. While we were at the site I tried to read each of the 1,177 crew names that were etched into the marble wall. After the boat brought us back from the USS Arizona we spent quite some time walking through the museum that highlighted the Pacific action in WW2. The multitude of displays were both informative and chilling. The highlight was the framed first draft edition of the “Day of Infamy” speech given by Franklin D. Roosevelt on December 8, 1941. On it you can see the handwritten edits. The original speech had the line “a date which will live in world history” and “world history” was crossed out, and handwritten above that is “day of infamy.” What a hell of an edit.

Karen stayed on to see more of Pearl Harbor and Scott and I headed out to explore Honolulu. Our first stop was Chinatown and we walked around for a bit taking in the sights and smells of the markets. We treated ourselves to Guava smoothies and Scott tested out his Charles Schwab atm card as practice for our upcoming Thailand trip, to see if they truly will reimburse the atm fee (they did). It turns out that I am a terrible security guard, because as he was at the atm getting his cash I wandered off in search of the smoothies… oops! He was fine and didn’t get mugged so he was able to enjoy his guava smoothie. On the way out of Chinatown we drove by the Iolani Palace, the only royal palace in the United States. We stopped for a brief walk around its grounds and were most impressed by the unbelievably sprawling banyan trees. Scott scooped up a banyan seed with the intention of planting one of these iconic behemoths back in Easley. He was sad when I googled it and discovered that the soil has to be 70-85℉ for it to grow so he tossed it out.

Next we headed to Waikiki beach. Scott had wanted to rent a surfboard and surf but the waves were too tame today on this side of the island, so he settled for swimming and hammocking. We enjoyed floating around in the water and then heading to the hammocks for a nap. The beach at Waikiki was perfect for hammocking because it had palm trees just a few yards from the water and they provided just enough shade. (While I was lounging in my hammock an apparently schizophrenic homeless man wandered alarmingly close to my hammock and began wildly gesticulating. I was cocooned in my hammock and oblivious. Scott happened to notice, and instead of shooing him away from me, whipped out his phone and started filming the gesticulations in time-lapse mode so he would have an entertaining video for perpetuity.)

We wanted to watch the sunset from atop Tantalus so we packed up the hammocks and gave ourselves plenty of time to get to the famous lookout spot that sits on a former macadamia grove on a mountain overlooking Honolulu. It was just a 25 minute drive and we were lucky to snag a parking spot at the park. Lots of other people had our same idea and as the sun sank lower in the sky more people appeared. The view was brilliant because you could see downtown Honolulu, Waikiki, Pearl Harbor, Diamond Head crater, and the entire Mamala Bay. Some of my favorite pictures of our whole trip were taken from Tantalus that night.

We had one last thing scheduled for the day and that was dinner at a kitschy spot that Scott had found online. The restaurant was called La Mariana Sailing Club and it was the set for the tv show Hawaii Five-0. Never in a million years would you find this place if you weren’t specifically looking for it because it was tucked back in an industrial park right along the harbor. It was a classic tiki bar with all the gloriously tacky decor that goes along with that. We delighted over umbrella drinks and seafood as the tiki-gods watched us. It was very much a thing-to-do in the place-to-do-it and we thoroughly enjoyed ourselves. By now you can probably guess what we did next, right? We drove back to Kailua and were asleep before our heads hit the pillows.