Hawaii - September 30, 2003

With the time zone change, waking up early was easy. Getting the family ready to go and out the door wasn't nearly so simple.

We headed west towards Pearl City, our destination: the USS Arizona Memorial. We arrived at about 8:15 Hawaii time, or roughly lunch time in Arizona and we were starving.

Security at the memorial was tight. Nothing other than your person and cameras could go in. Even camera bags were not allowed inside the memorial, and they were strictly enforcing it.

What we weren't prepared for was the way the memorial is run. Visitors are assigned into batches, when your turn comes, you watch a movie, then you take a boat ride out to the memorial, where you stay for 30 minutes. The place was already busy, and there was over an hour wait to start the movie, which we were told was 75 minutes long.

A quick calculation told me we'd be at the memorial almost 3 more hours before we'd get a chance to eat. That wasn't an option and we abandoned our plan to visit the memorial that day.

We headed further into Pearl City, looking for something to eat, when we ran across Anna Miller's¹, which is a Japanese chain restaurant which I thought operated exclusively in Japan. It wasn't too surprising, though, considering just how many Japanese tourists were everywhere we went on Oahu.

Anna Miller's claim to fame, such as it is, is that all the waitresses wear little bust-emphasizing tops and short skirts. That's just fine, if your waitress is a 21-year old Japanese woman. It's not so good if, like us, your waitress is a 60-year old Hawaiian woman.

Meanwhile, Michelle was turning heads all over the restaurant, and she was loving it. At times the commotion she caused was almost as much as when she was in Taiwan.

Chu-Wan took Michelle to the restroom while I went front to pay the bill. The cashier, the only woman in the place not wearing the traditional Anna Miller's garb was the only woman in the place who would have looked great in it. As it was, she took my credit card, looked at the picture and started telling me how good my picture looked. She then proceeded to tell me how awful her picture looked and pulled it out to demonstrate. The reason it looked so bad was because she'd been really drunk the night before she had it taken.

I really wasn't too sure what was going on there... either she was really proud at how bad she looks when she's drunk (It wasn't a good picture) or she was giving me a not-so-subtle hint that she's easy to get drunk. I was, of course, never to find out.

Chu-Wan picked our next destination, the Dole Pineapple Plantation. She tried to deny it, but the reason she wanted to go was because they have special Hello Kitty merchandise not available anywhere else. I, on the other hand, wanted to see "The world's largest garden maze" which is also at the plantation, so we were in total agreement.

On the map, it's quite a ways inland, but as you travel there, you begin to get a sense of how small the island really is.

They give out prizes for the fastest maze transversal each day. Our time was 55 minutes, just a near-miss of the all-time record of 6 minutes.

Inside the maze, I made use of my cell phone to contact help back in Arizona, hoping someone could find an online map to the maze and talk us through it. Unfortunately, the maze designers must have thought of that because no help could be found.

Sometimes I find it interesting of the things we just don't think about. Up until we arrived at the Dole Plantation, I had never given the slightest thought to how pineapples were grown. I had some vague notion (totally wrong) that they grew on something similar to a palm tree, like a coconut. In fact, they grow on scrubby little, almost cactus-like plant just on the ground. Well, at least I learned something on this day.

We ate lunch at the plantation (including pineapples) bought some souvenirs and headed farther north.Our intention was to head to the extreme North West point of the island. To arrive at the northwest point, you want to travel overland. Apparently, the west coast is no-tourists land.

For starters, the shape and position of the Hawaiian islands means that the eastern sides of the island get lots of rain, but since each island is one or more ancient volcanoes they've all got a mountain range splitting them in two. The western sides are mesquite and cactus deserts. On oahu, the western dividing range is controlled by the military, and the coastal parts are inhabited by not-so-friendly natives who'd rather the tourists stay away. Harassment of tourists and theft of their property is not unheard of and most guidebooks just say "stay away." They also say there's nothing to see there anyway.

We didn't actually make it to the northwest point, but instead headed round the island in a clockwise fashion.

We stopped at a beach somewhere on the north shore and took Michelle out for her first encounter with the ocean. She wouldn't go anywhere near the water, which is probably good since the north shore's surf can be rough. It was amazing, though, just how much sand can adhere to one child. We saw some endangered green sea turtles basking on the shore and although Michelle was interested in them we stayed away from them as is required by the law. Not everyone on the beach was quite so law-abiding.

Most of Oahu is rather rural and it was an enjoyable drive around the island.

Back in Waikiki we headed out to find the only MOS Burger¹ shop in the US. MOS is another Japanese chain of restaurants that has spread over Asia. In fact, it has become my favorite hamburger shop in Taiwan, probably because of the unique sauce, which I've yet to identify, on the burgers. In Hawaii, the MOS burgers are "local-sized" which means they're as big as a regular American hamburger . It was delicious, if a little overdone.

After dark, we took a drive looking for Chinatown. After circling around what I thought was the area for a while, I started to tease Chu-Wan that Chinatown closed up at 6:00PM. It turned out to be not so much a joke, when we did find it, everything was closed.

Although we didn't experience Chinatown, we did get some first-hand, practical experience with Hawaii's freeway system. It's rather difficult to describe, the freeways don't seem to have proper on-ramps. Instead you follow H1 signs round in circles, through neighborhoods around apartment complexes and suddenly you're on the freeway. "Freeway" being a generous term for something that looks like a freeway, but has a maximum speed limit of 50 miles an hour. That's the maximum legal speed, during rush hour, the speed drops to something like 15. As far as we could tell, it was always rush hour.

On to Day 3 ==>

 ¹You'll need the ability to display Japanese fonts to see this one. I recommend using a Macintosh.

Oahu - Michelle and Chu-Wan	Oahu - Pearl Harbor. The USS Missouri and the USS Arizona Memorial	Oahu - Japanese chain restaurant Anna Miller's - Pearl City	Oahu - The Dole Pineapple plantation visitor's center	Parking lot at Dole Plantation
Oahu - The sign says it all	Oahu - Michelle at Dole Plantation	Oahu - A pineapple in its native environment	Oahu - There's something you don't see every day...	Oahu - Inside the Dole Plantation Maze
Oahu - The Dole Plantation garden maze	Oahu - Sea Turtles	Oahu - Sea Turtles	Oahu - Hawaiian sea turtle on north shore of Oahu	Chu-Wan and Michelle posing with Hawaiian Sea Turtles
Oahu - Signs, signs, signs	Oahu - north shore beach	Oahu - L4 makes his way back to the sea	Oahu	Oahu - Heavily eroded mountains on eastern side of island
Oahu	Japanese chain restaurant MOS Burger - Honolulu