Last Day on Oahu

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Aloha for the last time from Hawaii….all good things must come to an end I suppose!!!

It’s Sunday here and it was a cooler, cloudy day…a day when again we didn’t do a lot really.

Joy was ‘desperate’ to get some of the skin care product that she likes to use but it is very expensive to buy at home and she ‘missed’ it on our first trip to the Waikele Outlet Centre, even though she purchased a heap of other ‘stuff’ of the same brand at really good prices.

So around 10.30am after a rather lazy start to the day (well it is Sunday after all) we headed out to the Outlet Centre again and managed, this time, to get the correct product at a 2 for 1 price (under half what she pays at home even taking the dollar conversion into account) plus 2 free gifts of others in the same product range….don’t ask me how it all works but they seem to love giving stuff away.

We finished all that just before noon and then headed over the mountains on the Likelike Highway to a huge botanical gardens at Kaneohe called Ho’omaluhia. This place is 200 hectares of lush tropical vegetation and has areas devoted to many parts of the world’s vegetation including Hawaii, Melanesia, Polynesia, Sri Lanka etc. etc. and was really quite fascinating…and it was FREE.

We even ran into rain for the first time on holiday going over the mountains!!!

We walked down to a big lake and even saw a mongoose running across the grass…couple of photos attached……we know it was a mongoose because we showed the photos to one of the staff as we didn’t know what it was and they said it was a mongoose…

We also found some plants/trees that bore exact resemblance to some of our natives….one called O’hia that was a dead ringer for our Pohutukawa and one that looked like Kauri. I suppose our Maori when they sailed from Hawaiiki brought plants with them etc.

Drove and walked around the gardens for a couple of hours before heading down to a nearby town for some lunch.

Back across the Likelike Highway to Honolulu and back to the hotel by around 4pm and started to do some packing up…..we seem to have a lot more ‘stuff’ to take home than we arrived with!!!!! 😊 Just as well we packed one of our cases inside a bigger case eh???

We headed down to the beach front for our final sunset…again with the hoardes and Joy got some more ‘excellent’ photos, some of which I’ll attach.

Quick bite for dinner and we are now back in our room doing some serious pre-departure packing….boohoo!!!

So that’s us for Sunday from here…as I said a fairly quiet day.

Tomorrow we have to be at the airport at 10.30am so a reasonably early start with hotel check-out, rental car return (thank goodness returning the rental car is a little less painless than picking it up…….or it was on Maui anyway) and then check-in with Hawaiian Airlines for our 1.30pm flight back to Auckland. So we will be back in NZ around 9.30pm on Tuesday after crossing the International Dateline and loosing 23 hours (I think that’s how it works this time or is it gaining????)

I’ll post a final story from Auckland in the next day or so. We are staying at Denise’s for Wednesday (too old to cram all that travel nowadays) and will drive back to Waipukurau on Thursday.

Mahalo for the final time.

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Photos

The original Waikiki Hotel
just along the other end of beach from us.

Comments

[Mrs Judith Finlay]

Home again
Looking forward to seeing you back in NZ. I have so enjoyed the updates.