Everybody Needs A Rest Sometime, Even on Vacation

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Today was a partial day of rest. We've been go go go since we got to the island, and it was a welcome change of pace to have a little down time. I slept in this morning (6:45 a.m.) and spent some time relaxing, and then we went down to the beach and played in the water some. After that I worked on the photographs that I'd taken, burning them to CD-ROMs, just in case the worst were to happen to my laptop.

Finally, we all got restless and decided to go do something, so after everybody got a shower in, Barb, Laura, Cheryl and I piled into the minivan and headed for Honolulu to do some siteseeing and shopping at the Aloha Tower. We checked out a ukelele shop where I almost bought cheap ukeleles for all of us, but then decided against, for two reasons: a) We didn't want to carry them around while we shopped, and b) we didn't want to have to figure out how to get them back to Seattle.

We then went to the Bad Ass Coffee store to grab some of the coffee we'd been enjoying every morning. This particular franchise was purported to be owned by the owners of the beach house at which we were staying, but as it turns out, our information was about a year out of date; they had sold the franchise. So, we didn't get the discount, but by the time we found it out, we'd already filled up our shopping baskets with coffee and other goodies and felt uncomfortable about just walking out.

After that, and a search of our bags, we went up in the Aloha Tower and took a bunch of pictures of downtown Honolulu and the bay and various and sundry other things viewable from the tower. That was pretty cool, because there was a rainbow over the mountains behind Honolulu, which we all got pictures of.

Then we shopped at various places on the way back to the minivan, and then headed to Waikiki beach to watch the sunset. It was there that I got my first really good view of Diamondhead which was very impressive. Then we all ran around watching and getting pictures of the sunset which was quite spectacular. Then it got dark, and the beach park became very deserted, so we hopped in the van and headed back to the beach house.

All in all, even with all the shopping, it was a pretty restful day.

As usual, for more photos, see my Hawai'i 2006 Flickr set.

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Photos

Diamondhead
Barb, Cheryl and Laura pose for me in front of Diamondhead.