Hawaii: Part 3

Here's the recap of the remainder of the Hawaii trip.

Tuesday, Joe was at the trade show all day. I bummed around at the beach and took a long nap at the hotel while he was there. That evening we went out to dinner with Judy's mom (Judy is one of Joe's friends from law school) who lives on Oahu. She took us to a Japanese buffet restaurant and there was TONS to eat. The food was really fresh and very good. I ate tons of tempura vegetables which are my favorite, as well as lots of other yummy things.

Here we are with Judy's mom at the mall by the Aloha Tower.

Wednesday Joe only had to do a half day at the trade show and he was finished by noon and they packed everything up. We spent the afternoon at the beach. Joe went out and tried to boogie board but didn't have a lot of success. He swam way out to where the surfers were because there weren't many waves close in. But way out there the waves were too big and he ended up being pounded by the them. The two guys from work he was boarding with wanted to stay out there, so he was out there for an hour. He was tired when he swam back in. I told him he needed to go to a beach that was good for boogie boarding in order to be successful. The beach we were on was better for casual swimming. The only waves were way out there and they were huge. A couple of people spotted a small hammerhead shark where I was swimming, so I got out of the water after that. I didn't want to risk getting bit, even if it was a small one.

I zoomed in on Joe swiming to shore after his battle with the waves.

That evening we went to another Japanese restaurant called Kobe with Joe's fellow co-workers. It was a restaurant like Shogun, where you sit at a bar that wraps around a huge cooking griddle. The chef comes out and cooks your food right in front of you with lots of fancy flair and fire. The atmosphere was fun and the food was excellent. Some of the best steak I've ever had. I even tasted the shrimp which I don't like and I was able to eat it. I wouldn't choose to fill up on it, but it was edible. That's saying something for me.

At the Japanese restaurant. You can see some of the food cooking on the bottom right.

Thursday we checked out of our hotel mid-morning, and we spent the day at the Arizona Memorial at Pearl Harbor. The wait for the tour was very long. Almost three hours! If you ever go, get there early as soon as they open before the tour buses get there for the day. After you pick up your passes, you can leave the site and just show up at the time your tour is ready to start. So we left and found a place to eat lunch, went into a grocery store to buy candy for our trip, and drove back to the memorial. We arrived with about ten minutes to spare before our tour started. The tour really made me think about WWII and made it so much more real than a story in a history book. The people involved were real people, just like you and I, with families, dreams, and ambitions of their own. It's sad to think of war taking that away from people and at the same time makes me so incredibly grateful that people have sacrificed all of that in order to ensure that this incredible country we live in remains safe and free. I don't know how they find the strength and the courage to make that kind of a sacrifice but I am grateful to those men and women who have.

The U.S.S. Arizona Memorial, Pearl Harbor. It hovers over the remains of the sunken ship. You can see portions of the ship under the water and it's kind of sad to think that is the exact spot where thousands of people died. It's also hard to imagine that beautiful harbor engulfed in burning flames.

Inside the memorial. A wall of all the names of our military guys who died that day.

After our tour we went on a little drive, ate some dinner, and headed to the airport. The flight was uneventful and we came home to lots of happy children who had been taken care of by the best grandmas in the world!