We left the condo with a few extra hours to spare in order to travel up Haleakala, which is actually an ACTIVE volcano, not inactive as I stated a couple days ago. We traveled all the way up to the very tip-top, above the clouds and found an amazing wonderland of solid lava and rocks. It looked like what you'd expect the surface of Mars to look like. It was pretty darned cold up there, too, at 10,000 feet. The lack of oxygen up there made us all pretty tired pretty fast. We took some great photos and then headed back down the twisty mountain, headed for the airport.
We departed from Maui, headed for Honolulu once again. This time we'd be staying for 6 days before making the trip back to the east coast.
We picked up our luggage and rental car and headed out into the wild blue yonder known as Honolulu. The entire experience riding from the airport to the hotel was a little shocking. This city's a bit larger and more congested than I expected. In fact, it makes Richmond look pretty small and tame. There are lots of people (mostly asian) here. And lots of people riding mopeds down the street at 90mph. In other words, it's a zoo. Couple that with misleading road signs and you've got an interesting experience.
We made it to our hotel and checked into our room. The room ended up being SLIGHTLY smaller than we had hoped for, but we're managing ok with it. It's barely two rooms, and Olivia and I get to sleep on a pull-out sofa bed about 5 feet from the foot of the bed in the bedroom. Jennifer is sleeping on the floor directly beside their bed. In other words, we're all getting to know each other alot better. :)
Today we visited Pearl Harbor and the Arizona Memorial, knocking that off my list of things I wanted to see before I die. It was just as I expected it to be: very humbling. Very informational, though.
We continued up through the middle of Oahu, through the town where Olivia's parents lived for a few years, stopping briefly to tour the city, visit her old house, and eat some lunch at Maui Tacos. Good mexican food, btw.
We continued up to the north shore, where we stopped in at a very nice beach and enjoyed some shave ice. We battled the traffic back down to Honolulu, visted the Apple Store in the Ala Moana shopping center, and then came back to the hotel to crash.
Oahu is ok so far. I'm really not liking it as well as I liked Kaui and Maui. This has a much more big-city feel to it. Quite honestly, if you took New York City and and Tokyo and meshed them together, you'd have downtown Honolulu and the Waikiki Beach area where we're staying. It's neat, bit not as quiet and relaxing as the other two islands.
Posted by Jeff at June 24, 2003 07:11 AM
Comments
I have been to New York City and Shanghai (kind of like Tokyo in size) and I can imagine what the combination would be like. All I can say is, keep your purse/wallet etc. in front of you--I lost a camera in a crowd like that once.
Today we visited Pearl Harbor and the Arizona Memorial, knocking that off my list of things I wanted to see before I die. It was just as I expected it to be: very humbling. Very informational, though.
