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I felt like a lot of Sunday was wasted shopping and navigating Honolulu, and today ended up being similar. Some people look forward to shopping while on vacation. Not me!

The owners' literature at the house said that they also own Bad Ass Coffee Company, located in the Aloha Tower Marketplace downtown. The house was stocked with badass Bad Ass goodies, like Kona coffee and pineapple-coconut pancake mix. The 15% discount sounded good, and we liked the idea of throwing the owners some extra business. We made a special trip to the Tower, and had already established significant rapport with the gentleman at Bad Ass and made several selections, when I mentioned the beach house and he (rather affrontedly) informed us that the previous owners had sold the shop to him last year and he was not honoring any such discount. (What makes this even weirder is the fact that my folks were here yesterday and they did get the discount! Bwah?) By then I felt like it would be "rude" to put down my purchases and walk out, so I bought the stuff anyway. It's a fine example of why I hate shopping. It's perfectly good stuff that I wanted and will enjoy, but every time I use it I'll feel kinda dumb for having bought stuff I didn't really need just to be "nice".

[Postscript from home: OK, so the coffee is really, really good.]

The Aloha Tower itself is on the National Register of Historic Places, and it's got that wonderful 1940s-50s architecture going for it. It isn't very tall, and the weather wasn't great for a lookout over the city, but I did get a few nice pictures.

After the Tower, we drove around for a while looking for, and failing to find, a camera shop for Greg to purchase a polarizing filter for one of his new lenses. Traffic in Honolulu is no fun: think heavy congestion + island time.

We finally extracted ourselves from the downtown core and headed down Ala Moana Boulevard toward Waikīkī. I don't really know what to say about Waikīkī except that I'm glad we're not staying there. The sheltered beach looked really appealing compared to our rougher surf, though, and I think this time of year it might even be possible to get anywhere near the water. Sunsets on Waikīkī are gorgeous, no two ways about that. We had fun filling up our memory cards with all kinds of views of the sun, sea, sky, surfers and skyline.

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