Happy Birthday #1 (not to be confused with 1st Birthday)

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Today is Anne's 17th birthday! She kicked off her celebration in the Central European time zone yesterday via a Skype call from her family in Schenefeld - noon Sunday our time, just after midnight Monday theirs.

After countless grill-related near-catastrophes, we managed to grill SPAM®burgers and very strange bright red hot dogs which we served with Velveeta® Shells 'n' Cheese. Anne was not convinced by my claims that this is pretty much the same thing as Käsespätzle, even after I reassured her that I've had Käsespätzle.

The sun fell down behind the mountains promptly at 6:30 PM, so we supped in the dark on the lanai and argued like geeks about how to order our sightseeing backlog. We settled on Pearl Harbor for early tomorrow (Monday) morning and since that's enough planning for an Agile vacation, declared ourselves done and all fell into bed almost immediately after.

Monday morning dawned at some point which I mostly missed due to sleeping. Greg got up early and made it to the beach for near-sunrise photography, plus he documented the presence of a random chicken in our yard.

There's some chickens back there on that road.

OMG! Did you ask them why?

After showers and breakfast cereal and mini chocolate donuts, we headed into Honolulu to see Pearl Harbor. Woah! When we were here in 2006, I don't think we even realized the entire thing was under construction. Hawaiʻian architecture is unfamiliar enough, how were we to know the memorial wasn't all in tents on purpose? Big surprise today when we found huge, open grounds with shiny new buildings all around: two ticket & info counters, two new interpretive exhibits, a snack bar not-in-a-tent, gift shop not-in-a-tent, and a new audio guide rental counter just on the side we saw. You still can't take even a small purse or camera bag inside the memorial, because, 9/11. It's idiotic. Cargo pants with big pockets are fine. Laura had the first pre-teen meltdown I've ever seen from her, when she was informed that emo hair is not an acceptable substitute for sunscreen and sunscreen in Hawaiʻi is not optional. Sunscreen was applied and the sullenness wasn't waterproof, so it wore off quickly enough.

We had two hours before our ferry to the USS Arizona memorial on the water, so Greg & I picked up audio guides while the rest of the family split up to see the grounds on their own. Wouldn't've minded more time, actually. The new exhibits are absolutely excellent. The film shown in the theater before the ferry is the same as before, I think, except for the welcome addition of a reminder to silence cell phones. The USS Arizona explosion audio still shakes the building.

After the memorial, we got local with awesome conveyor-belt sushi at a tiny little place in a strip mall in ʻAiea. Lots of unfamiliar stuff glided by and I tried all of the things, even natto. Natto now joins a very, very short list of foods I do not like even though it probably won't eat me first. We talked for several minutes about natto's snot-like properties before thinking to explain to Anne what "snot" means and then she was horrified, even though she'd already made contact with the natto which should have been all the horrifying she needed.

With some trepidation, we headed into Waikīkī Beach. We all pretty strongly dislike Waikīkī. But, we scheduled a sunset cruise on the awesome Maita'i Catamaran, which sails from Waikīkī, so there you are, or rather, there we were. Our patience and perseverance were rewarded many times over when we discovered that the sunset cruise, unlike the daytime one we took in 2006, includes unlimited beverage service. Mai tais for everyone! Well, mai tais for us and Sprites for the minors. I did in fact lose count of my mai tais; all I know is my cup didn't stay empty for long during our 90-minute sail. We had cloud interference with sunset, but got decent pictures anyway, and got to sing along with a surprising number of Jackson 5 hits on the PA. With help from all the passengers and crew and 10 gallons of mai tai mix, we all sang "Happy Birthday" to Anne very, very loudly as the ship came in to shore.

Debarking the Maita'i (very carefully), it became apparent we would need to hang out in Waikīkī a while longer until the unlimited beverage service wore off. We decided to brave dinner in the shopping district, which was frankly unpleasant all around. Everything in Waikīkī is radically overpriced, of course. Our first attempt to just walk in to a nearby expensive steak & seafood house was foiled when it turned out nearly all online reviewers said the food was awful. We abandoned the place and set off in search of a Chinese restaurant Greg looked up on the Urbanspoon Android app. We never found the place: his phone insisted we were standing right at it, but it equally stubbornly wasn't there. Might have been the high-rise hotels interfering with his phone's GPS and making up stories about where it thought we were. Hawai'ians don't seem to be committed to putting signs up with the streets' names on them, so it's challenging to independently verify wherever our phones tell us we are other than that we seem to have consensus about being on O'ahu. In other words, we thought we were standing at a place where we thought a particular Chinese restaurant should be, but it's possible we were really half a mile away and we wouldn't easily be able to tell that Google Maps' "you are here" dot was steering us wrong.

The girls finally declared that we should shut up and eat at the L&L Hawai'ian Barbecue we'd passed a few minutes before, so we did, and I have to say mine was tasty: garlic ahi and awesome beef stew with a slightly sweet gravy, plus ubiquitous mac salad. Greg was sad about having to have plate lunch (cheap Hawai'ian meat-with-rice dish) again, but at least he got to try Loco Moco finally: hamburger patty over rice, topped with fried egg and brown gravy. The plate lunch at Sweet Home Waimanalo, which we had Saturday, is a lot better than anywhere else we've tried so far.

We limped home over the mountains, and Anne opened her gifts from home including a nice letter from Santini! It's a crazily late night for us (I'm the last holdout here at 11 PM), but fortunately we have an "unallocated" day tomorrow which most of the family is interpreting as "rest". I'm hoping for some time at a swim-friendly (breakers-free) beach!

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Comments

[Mom]

Interesting Pearl Harbor!
Weaving in and out of your message trying to figure out all the gibberish language of eating places you were trying to go to is weird! Glad you are all having a good time, including Anne's birthday! Are you doing the same for Laura's? House is fine, Archie didn't need much... just lots of loving. Lovely clear and colorful fall weather here.