Oahu: Day 5

Our last day on Oahu.

Having fun, Captain Midnight?  "You betcha!"

How 'bout you, Miss V?  "I LOVE IT HERE!"

But there was still one vacation-y thing that Captain Midnight and Miss V were keen to do: snorkeling.

So the fam all suited up and headed down to Turtle Bay (not to be confused with Turtle Beach, which is a different place).

Well, most of us suited up.  I was lame and chose to stay on the beach due to BIG FAT TUM AND THE THUNDER THIGHS, which if you're wondering is not a good name for a rock band.  Yeah, I know it's stupid.  I'm not self-conscious about my age or my height, just about appearing in public in a swimsuit.

So instead, I went and looked at tidepools.

You don't want to fall over on these rocks.  They're pretty sharp.  And the wind was coming in pretty strong that day; I was in some danger of falling over.

The tidepools featured some modest flora and fauna, including one little black crab who beat a hasty retreat, muttering crabbily to himself, as soon as he saw me coming.

I also proved there are shells to be found on Oahu beaches, though they're not very impressive.

Meanwhile, Little C was busy looking for monk seals...

...and Captain Midnight and Miss V were busy snorkeling.  They saw lots of brightly colored fish in the bay, including the humuhumunukunukuapua'a featured on CM's shirt.  (It must've thought they were groupies.)

 Seems legit.  And sandy.

Misses E and V had themselves a good time.

The rest of the fam had fun goofing around in the water as well.

Since CM's mom and I were both out of the water, we decided to walk around to the other side of the hotel...

...where conditions weren't nearly as sheltered.  You can't really tell from these pictures, but the waves breaking on this other beach were huge.

No surfers were crazy enough to try them in this weather.

Beautiful, though.

We went back to the house, had some Thanksgiving leftovers, and just happened to be around when a couple of wild piglets got into the cul-de-sac and started roaming around.  Unfortunately, none of the pictures we took turned out very well.  Maybe Little C has better ones on her camera.

Then Brian, Captain Midnight and I went out geocaching (and waymarking) while V and E biked over to nearby Kahuku to do some shopping.

Captain Midnight also had to stop by the university ceramics studio to see how his pot was doing (he'd thrown a few pots with Brian a while earlier).  This one has a nice shape, but it would be a challenge getting it back to the mainland.

We also took a look at this island...

...which decided to look back at us.  Eep.

It really was idyllic.  At any moment I expected Mr. Rourke to appear and announce, "Welcome to Fantasy Island!"

We had many adventures in geocaching which were not photographed, including getting eaten alive by mosquitoes and meeting up with a couple of homeless guys who were hanging out near a local cache. Afterward we headed back to the neighborhood to get Shave Ice: The Sequel.

For dinner, the whole family reconvened and drove to the Kahuku Grill.

If you go here, expect delicious food, but don't expect it to be fast.  Their single chef takes orders only as fast as he can cook them, and it's easy for things to get backed up during the dinner rush.  We were there for nearly 2 hours.

After our meal we scampered home, did our last-minute packing, piled into the rental car, drove down to Honolulu and promptly got lost by following the driving directions on CM's phone.  Only after we'd followed its advice to two different dead-end streets did we decide to ignore the phone and suss it out by ourselves.  This turned out to work much better.

Once again I had to go through a patdown at Honolulu Airport, because I steadfastly refuse to go through the Cavity Search Photo Booth.  (Boo.)  TSA bigwigs, take note: I will gladly walk through a metal detector.  I don't have any problems with getting my luggage screened.  But when your stooges start treating me like a convicted criminal without any proof I've done something wrong, I do have a tendency to get uppity.  What happened to the legal concept of "innocent until proven guilty?"  Especially when there's a good chance I will miss my flight back to the mainland because of the Kabuki-theater crap you're pulling at a checkpoint.  We all know just how effective it's been at finding terrorists so far.

But we needn't have worried about missing our flight.  United Airlines had us sitting on the tarmac for two-plus hours after we boarded, while the maintenance crew worked on the plane.  At some point during these shenanigans, the experience became

Day 6: Welcome to Bonus Stage

If I'd known then what I know now, I would've booked another direct flight home with Alaska rather than playing patty-cake with United.  They had set us up to catch a connecting flight in San Francisco.  Needless to say, after 2 hours of delay on the tarmac in Honolulu, that flight was long gone.  So we sat in the San Francisco airport on Tuesday morning, bleary after the red-eye flight, while Captain Midnight engaged in a pitched battle with United's customer service.  Their idea of a generous offer was to toss us a couple of complimentary drink tickets and a coupon entitling us to a percentage off our next flight with them (neither of which was particularly appealing to a by-now tired and frustrated Mormon family), and to put us on a flight leaving near midnight. Uh, no. Don't get me wrong, San Francisco, I like you a lot, but I didn't want to be cooped up in your airport all day, nor did I cherish the thought of dragging multiple pounds of luggage all over the city.

Fortunately we noticed another United flight at a gate just across from ours, scheduled to leave for Seattle later that morning.  We took the initiative to put ourselves on standby, the flight turned out to have some seats free and we were on our way home, no particular thanks to United's tepid customer service.  The general caliber of our experience led us to make a firm decision regarding future flights with United.  I'll let you figure it out.

And that should bring us back up to speed.  We went to Hawaii!  It was awesome!

Thanks for having us, Brian and Caryn and family!

Oahu: Day 4

Sunday.  We had our church meetings at the Hukilau Chapel, which has an interesting bit of local history.

See, back in 1940, the wooden LDS chapel in La'ie was destroyed by fire.  Members of the Church, led by Viola Kehau Kawahigashi, decided to put together a fundraiser so they could rebuild their meetinghouse. They decided to host a hukilau (a traditional net-fishing method) at the nearby La'ie Beach, with a dinner and hula show to follow. People who attended the hukilau were charged $5.00 a head, and the members took in $1,250 at the first hukilau gathering in 1947. These events were so popular that they continued to be held regularly as a local tourist attraction until 1970.  Not only did these Church-sponsored gatherings bring in enough money to rebuild the chapel, they also inspired songwriter Jack Owens to write "The Hukilau Song," and eventually these dinner-and-dance shows led to the founding of...

...this place.  The beach where these shindigs were held was renamed Hukilau Beach...

 ...which it is called to this day.  So there's your serving of Useless Trivia for the day!

One of the side effects of rebuilding a meetinghouse in piecemeal fashion is that the Hukilau Chapel is oddly stitched together, as though local builders just cobbled together additions as they could afford them.  Consequently, some rooms are not directly accessible from the main building, and you have to go outside and walk around the grounds to enter, say, the Primary room.  On at least one occasion the Church has considered demolishing the Hukilau Chapel and building a standard chapel in its place, but let's just say that didn't meet with local approval.  People worked and sacrificed to build that chapel, and they have an emotional investment in the building, warts and all.  I can understand that.

The meetinghouse is also an odd mix of local and non-local details.  The jalousie windows let in the light and the wind from the sea, which only makes sense in the local climate.  But the standard metal folding chairs found in nearly every LDS chapel in North America don't fare so well in these conditions; almost every chair shows signs of rust and corrosion from the humid sea air.

And, as always, there were chickens.  My friend Laurence gave me a haiku challenge to sum up the Sunday experience on Oahu -- the peace of a church meeting, the sound of the wind in the banana plants, etc. -- and I came up with this:

Hukilau Chapel
Bands of chickens roam the streets
Cluck cluck cluck, swish swish

Yeah, that's about right.

After church, Caryn decided that even though it was February we should have a Thanksgiving dinner together as a family.  So we gathered together and had turkey and all the trimmings, and pretty much put ourselves into a food coma for a few hours after that.

Rising from our coma like zombies, we decided to follow Brian and Teddy the Wonder Dog on their evening constitutional to the BYU Hawaii campus.  Teddy has done this so many times that if you try to walk him somewhere else, he gets confused and starts pulling you in a different direction (as Miss V found out when she tried to take him for a walk).

This institution was originally called the Church College of Hawaii.  There's a long tradition in the Church of encouraging members to get a postsecondary education, and it was difficult and expensive for Church members in Polynesia to attend BYU in Provo, so the Church founded this college on Oahu.  It became a university in 1974.

The McKay Building entrance features a mosaic of Church president David O. McKay with a large number of Hawaiian school children; across the top of the mosaic are the words of the Pledge of Allegiance, and along the bottom is the motto of the state of Hawaii:  Ua Mau ke Ea o ka 'Āina i ka Pono (The Life of the Land is Perpetuated in Righteousness).

A little more info on the mosaic.

And now, because I must keep a promise (and because this building is conveniently located between BYU-Hawaii and the PCC):

Behold: THE ENCHANTED TIKI McDONALD'S!

This building is truly odd.  Apparently it started out as some sort of wedding venue in La'ie, but was later bought and transmogrified into a McDonald's restaurant.  It has a two-story fake waterfall inside, and it offers a localized McDonald's menu with taro pie, haupia pie, banana pie, saimin, and a half-dozen items with Spam in them.  So that's fun.

Next up: our last day.

Oahu: Day 3

So after days of semi-patient waiting for her particular kind of fun, Miss V was finally rewarded on Saturday.  After a leisurely start, we drove down to Honolulu to shop at the Aloha Stadium Swap Meet.

This temporary shopping center rings Aloha Stadium and is filled with all manner of goodies to warm the cockles of your materialistic little heart.

It's about a mile's walk to complete the full circuit of the swap meet.  You can find everything from souvenirs to food to clothes to cell phone accessories on sale.  Even green coconuts, which were being sold out of the back of a pickup truck by a wizened little guy with a baseball cap, a cigarette and a machete.

I picked up some postcards and a package of li hing mango for my mom.  Captain Midnight got himself a Lava Blues T-shirt emblazoned with a humuhumunukunukuapua'a.  And Miss V?  Well, she went a little crazy with the whole "7 T-shirts for $20" concept.  Let's just say she's not going to run out of casual tops any time soon.

Now, I'm well acclimated to the rain and cold of a Pacific Northwest winter.  But "Hawaiian winter" looks and feels a lot like "Northwest summer."  Plus I'm diabetic, woefully out of shape and chronically dehydrated.  What did this all add up to?  Why, the magic of heat exhaustion, my friends!  I completed a mere circuit and a half of the swap meet before the dizziness and nausea hit.  Gleah.  Captain Midnight went forth and picked me up in the rental car, gallantly running the A/C while I panted like a German shepherd and sucked down a bottle of water.

Eventually we dragged Miss V away from the premises.  We then embarked on a drive that would take us more or less on a circle route of Oahu.  First stop: the island shopping paradise known as Costco.

Yeah, I know, "why Costco, Sooz?"  After all, the Costco experience is pretty much the same everywhere you go -- your basic big ol' steel-trussed box fulla economy-sized goodness.  But each one carries local products unique to the area, and lemme tell you, I have never seen SO MANY MACADAMIA NUT PRODUCTS in my entire life.  Plus they had some Korean barbecue flavored pork jerky for sale.  It was pretty much a moral imperative.

(By the way, if you ever get the chance to buy Korean barbecue flavored pork jerky, do it.  Seriously choice.)

More driving.  Along the route I spotted this sign, which filled my soul with equal measures of poetry and glee:

Is this the street that launched a thousand memes
And burnt the cheezburgers of lolcat fame?
Sweet Ohai, be thou immortal on this blog!

Um.  Clearly I'm no Kit Marlowe.

Our next stop?

Pineapple Central!  Also known as the Dole plantation in Wahiawā.

The inside of this place is full of souvenirs...

...including my own personal favorite, the tried-and-true penny smasher.  Plus they're pretty much selling pineapple-flavored everything as far as the eye can see.  And Dole Whips.  Mmm.

Captain Midnight and I wandered around outside for a bit to take a look at the grounds.  We did not take the Pineapple Express train nor get lost in the world's largest outdoor maze, but we did walk through the exhibition gardens.

Yes, those are little pineapple plants underneath the directional arrows.

Also, does anybody happen to know what kind of tree this is?  The odd stripy bark caught my eye.
ETA: Captain Midnight did his homework and informs me that this is a rainbow eucalyptus.

Speaking of eyes, CM and I noticed a feral cat living in the drainage hole just at the entrance to the plantation.  He had the most amazing luminous green eyes.  Unfortunately, he skedaddled into the hole the moment he decided we were getting too close.

Having satisfied our lust for all things pineapple, we drove on to Haleiwa where we met up with Brian and Caryn and the kids and had a late lunch at the Grass Skirt Grill.  Mmm, grilled ahi plate.  Plus I got to steal some bonus fries from Captain Midnight.  Forbiddenlicious.

We continued up the North Shore to Laniakea Beach, informally known as Turtle Beach.

It's quite beautiful, even without any turtles on the beach, though Miss V and Little C did spy some turtles in the surf.

Then we drove on to Waimea, where they spied a few surfers in the surf.

Another photo, another chance for Miss V to be fabulous.  She was really loving the beach, and wished she had brought her swimsuit with her when we left that morning.

I didn't take all that many photos on the beach because I was getting lazy and tired.  Rest assured, though, that there were wild chickens on the premises.  Then we completed the loop around the top of the island and back down to La'ie on the windward side.

A long day of fun requires a shave ice when you're done.  Brian and Caryn's neighbors down the street make and sell shave ice concoctions right from their driveway to help support their son, who is currently off being a missionary.  They didn't have any sugar-free syrups, so I just had a snaky lick of Captain Midnight's shave ice instead.  Mmmm!

Next: a day of rest means almost no foties.  Sorry.

Oahu: Day 2

Friday.  In the morning you lay awake in bed, feeling the wind come up from the sea.  It ruffles the leaves of the banana plant in the back yard, making a sound like rain, and filters through the glass slats of the jalousie windows.  The smell of something wonderful -- warm and spicy -- issues from the kitchen.

The "something wonderful" turned out to be stuffed roti, homemade by a sister in the ward.  Think breakfast burrito, Indian style -- curried meat and potatoes folded into a roti sandwich.  It was divine.

After breakfast, Captain Midnight and I walked over to the La'ie Temple, which is literally just next door to Brian & Caryn's place.

See?  It has a very Frank Lloyd Wright-esque quality about it, which isn't all that surprising when you consider that it was built in the 1910s, during Wright's heyday.  It's one of a very few LDS temples with no tower or spire of any kind.

We wandered around the grounds, went into the visitors' center, talked to the sister missionaries and eventually met up with CM's mom.  From there we walked down to Temple Beach...

...which looks like this.  With a rocky island way off in the distance.

Then we had to hotfoot it back to the house... for Friday was PCC Day.

The Polynesian Cultural Center is also owned and run by the Church, primarily to give BYU Hawaii students a work venue so they can pay for their college tuition.  It's been described as "Polynesian Disneyland," which isn't too far off the mark.  Since Brian works at BYU Hawaii he was able to get us tickets at a significant discount (thanks, Brian!).

So we wandered around and tried fresh poi (which isn't bad, actually -- aged poi, though, is The Nasty), learned about the history of hula and of Tahitian dance, bought some trinkets in the old La'ie mission home on the premises...

 ...and learned how to do a little weaving.

Behold our fishies!  We has mad weaving skillz!

Around mid-afternoon there was a water parade where dancers from different islands performed on floating boats.

Just to give you a little taste, here's a snippet of the performance from the Tongan contingent.

There were dancers representing Hawaii...

...the aforementioned Tonga...

...Tahiti...

...Samoa...

...Fiji...

...and Aotearoa (aka New Zealand).  The New Zealanders did a pretty impressive haka.

Then the Hawaiian royalty showed up.  In the old days, true red and bright yellow were difficult colors to make from natural dyes, so the Hawaiian monarchs hired birdcatchers whose job it was to catch red and yellow birds, harvest a few bright feathers from each one and release them, until there were enough feathers to cover a cape or cloak.  The things we do for beauty.

Speaking of beauty, Miss V decided to stop by the Aotearoa enclave and get herself a temporary tattoo.

This also got the Miss V seal of approval.  (Though I think her favorite thing in the park was watching a particularly attractive Samoan guy shinny up a coconut tree.  Talofa lava!)

We took a break from the PCC to go home for dinner, but later that evening we returned to watch the night show, Hā: Breath of Life.  The storyline was a little disjointed, but the dances and staging were amazing.

After much dithering, Miss V bought a harvest-your-own-pearl set, and when we got home from the PCC show she and Miss E opened it up.  Miss V dissected an oyster for its pearl and wore it proudly on a chain around her neck.

Saturday: circling the stadium and the island.