We have arrived in San Francisco! Got here on Friday night; will talk about here soon (preview... it is fantastic!...), but here are some pics from our final adventures in Hawaii – this is rather long, because we got a bit behind (hard to take a bad picture here)...
Tony made another golf-buddy (which he seems to do on most of our stops), and one afternoon, they played a well known course at Turtle Bay Resort on the less built-up North Shore. While they played golf, I explored the main town up there, which is called Haleiwa, and is basically for artists, surfers and tourists; for example, here is one of the galleries...
A Hawaiian specialty is shaved ice (basically a snow cone with more exotic flavours). One of the most popular shaved ice stands is Matsumoto’s in Haleiwa.
We had dinner that night at the Turtle Bay Resort before driving back to Kailua.
This next picture is of Hanauma Bay, a very enclosed area with a great reef for snorkelling; it is packed with people, though it is controlled, so you pay to get in and have to watch a conservation video first; it was beautiful, but with so many people going to see it, we felt bad about what will probably be it’s rapid deterioration in the near future.
We finally got to go to a Luau as well. This one was on a beach up the West coast from Honolulu.
Here is the pig ritual; getting the pig out of the pit in the ground, where it was cooked on hot rocks.
Hey, how did this picture get in here?
They had lots of swaying hula-girl hips too, so something for everybody.
And another site we had been meaning to get to and finally managed to see was Pearl Harbour. It was very well set up, and really interesting. Here is the USS Arizona memorial.
You take a short boat ride out to the memorial, which is built right over top of the USS Arizona, which is sunk in the water below. It is one of the few ships sunk at Pearl Harbour that could not be raised. It is now a pretty sacred site to many people as a lot of the crew also could not be recovered, so they are buried down there. It is very weird to look at the ship, which you can see clearly in the water. This is part of the ship that can be seen above water.
And Finally... We rented a ocean kayaks at lovely Kailua beach. It is such a great beach for water sports. The water can be kind of rough, so the kayaking was challenging and fun –
Hey, Tony, you don’t have to portage this!
we only tipped over once, and that was when we caught a wave coming in for our landing on shore! It dumped us out, upside down, right at the shore – we don’t have a picture because our camera was in the water at the time (luckily, in a dry bag).
Okay, that is the end of our Hawaii stories!
San Francisco is now ours to explore....
Happy spring to everyone!
Love, C & T
