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Published: March 12th 2009
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Here's Lauren's Story of the last part of the family trip. Sadly, I couldn't make it. Here's her story...
Sunday March 1st ranks as one of my top 10 most hilariously bizarre days of my life. Just to recap Mark’s summary of the previous day, the Boulier family was fortunate to entertain two happy hours and plenty of 7E purchased goods, if you know what I mean. All of that was enough for Sunday to be difficult enough, not to mention that we had to get Mark back to Singapore and the rest of us to Hawaii. My favorite part of Sunday was waking Mark up by pouring two buckets of ice water on his back…it really gave me gratification as the big sister. Next was seeing Mark off in the airport - he was wearing the same clothes from Saturday, plus food stains from all three plates of food he had from the buffet that morning, yet he still had an elated smile on his face. It was sad to leave him, but at least I didn’t have to listen to any more conversations about advanced physics 65! (Sorry Mark). So Mom and Dad and I boarded a plane
to Tokyo - the only thing I know about Tokyo is that we spent JY$2,240 on the most amazing McDonalds of my life.
We finally arrived in Honolulu at 7:45am Sunday. Sounds great right? Wrong. The problem with that arrival time was that we left Hong Kong at 9:05 am Sunday and had already traveled for 16 hours! Needless to say, our bodies were very disoriented, but Sunday was great, twice. We sat around the pool then wandered around Waikiki for beer and dinner. On our way back to the hotel we ran into people we knew from Jacksonville, FL - go figure! After a few drinks and a lot of talking, we headed back to the hotel and slept on the 22nd floor with the windows open - it was wonderful.
We didn’t do much on Monday, but thanks to the Florida friends we ran into, they suggested that we take a sunset cruise off of Waikiki Beach. Now I’m not that far out of college, so I’ll just call it like it is - that catamaran trip was a booze cruise! The drinks flowed and we had a beautiful view of the sunset and
wildlife. After about 2 hours, we went back to shore then ventured to the International Market where dad bought Mom and me pearls (insert aww here). We were off to bed early because we had to be ready for a Pearl Harbor tour at 6:45am!
So about that Pearl Harbor tour…yeah that was interesting. Our guide also happened to be our bus driver, which wouldn’t normally be a problem except that “Uncle Frank” was driving a Greyhound! That man talked in circles shaped like a trapezoid. Doesn’t make sense? Yeah, neither did he.
Pearl Harbor was one of those place that everyone needs to visit, and it’s a part of American History, but there aren’t any words to describe the experience. All I can say is that it was very humbling, check out the pictures below.
After Pearl Harbor, Uncle Frank drove us all around downtown Honolulu and Waikiki. The whole time I just tried to pretend that I had earplugs in my ear, and enjoyed the beautiful scenery and building of Hawaii. When we got back to the hotel, we went straight to the tour desk to book another adventure, as if
1 wasn’t enough for a day.
Adventure #2 was a bus to the west side of Oahu, taking us to “Germaine’s Luau.” That’s where we encountered the second most annoying guide of the day, lucky for us she was only the guide and someone else was driving. I would tell you more about that bus ride, but I tried to block it from my memory for my own sake.
After arriving at Germaine’s Luau and running straight for the Mai Tai line, we got to watch the really cool/cheesy ceremony where they take the pig our of the pit. For dinner and the show, we ended up at a table full of southerners - a couple from Texas and a couple from Mississippi. I liked them because they wanted to know where the barbeque sauce was for the roast pig. We quickly learned that Hawaiians don’t eat barbeque sauce, rather Poi which is also known as purple goo! After dinner the show started - and that consisted of a lot of hula dancing and not a lot of clothes! The luau was very entertaining with all of the cultural history and beautiful weather to
go along with it. After the show was over we bolted to the bus because, as we learned on the ride to the luau, the last one to the bus had to hula in a grass skirt and coconuts for all of the passengers. All I have to say about that is, those coconuts fit that mans chest very well! I was glad to make it back to the hotel when we did!
Wednesday was bittersweet because it was the last day of our trip, but we were also going on a snorkel cruise! I was excited about snorkeling, but a little nervous because the weather was “cool” (about 78 degrees). We ended up taking the same boat on the snorkel cruise as we did with the sunset cruise; the only difference was there were 8 of us instead of 38! We sailed around Waikiki for an hour and then anchored at”Turtle Cove”, appropriately named for the obscene amount of turtles that hang out around that reef. Only myself and Dad went in (the other people claimed they couldn’t “float”, and I didn’t argue with that). I saw lots of turtles and almost had the nerve to
touch one, but I wanted to be sure I would get back to Atlanta with 10 fingers. After we got out of the water, our boat chased a few dolphins and then headed back to shore.
We went back to our room, packed up and headed to the hotel. Our driver was a guy from Minnesota, a common theme around Hawaii I guess. From what I could tell, northerners would take one vacation to Hawaii, go back home and pack up their families to move to the beautiful state. Considering my current state of employment, that doesn’t sound like a bad idea. All in all, Hawaii was beautiful, but we missed Mark - he would have made it a true Boulier vacation. So in place of him we just drank a lot of beer, like he would have done if he was there!
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