Day 36 - Just another day in Paradise

Sadly this is our last day in Hawaii and even sadder, this is the last day of my entire vacay.  2 and a bit years in the planning and now she's all done and dusted.

We decided to have a bit of a low key, relaxer day today.  We slept in til around 10am and then we went to the Hilton Hawaiian Village.  It is a massive hotel village area.  We chose this destination to soak up the surrounds of the beautiful lagoon (even if it is man made).  I think it is the lagoon that appears in a night time scene in the 2002 surfer chick movie Blue Crush.

Some views of the gorgeous lagoon by day... 

 

Then came the flight of the birds.... they may look like seagulls but they are in fact pigeons.  Granted these birds reminded us of our days at Stella Maris (our high school) where you would always duck for cover from the seagulls in the hope that you would elude their poop.  Let me tell you, these bloody pigeons were low flying but we came out unscathed - poop wise!!

 

So here we are 'sunbaking' - all covered up!!  We had sunned our selves for about 40minutes and then we decided the smart thing to do would be to cover up. Ahhhh, how times have changed from the 80's and 90's where you weren't happy until you had brunt yourself to a crisp.  Chris even managed to get her eye balls sun burnt in either the late 80's or early 90's, sun burnt eye balls that is tanning commitment right there folks!!

Not quite the 3 Blue Crush girls are we?

 

 

This little poppet couple on their stand up paddle boards (SUP) kept us entertained for ages.  We think they probably met at the gym, and they were very competitive with each other, she usually won.  Like the legend that she is, she was even pulling out the yoga poses on her board. Impressive.

  

 

When we decided we'd had enough vitamin D for the say (sun), we explored the village to have  a late lunch.  We found this lovely café.  Chris and I ordered Mocktails and Shell ordered a Mimosa.  Chris and I were happy with our choice, Shell not so much happy with her choice.

 

 

 

 

 

Shell is fascinated that I seem to organise myself at the dinner table. The first photo Shell took of me in about 2009 at a Mexican restaurant.  the second photo was taken in Hawaii today!  Spot the organisational similarities...

 

 

After lunch we cabbed it back to our hotel to relax, check out our suitcase packing situations and we washed our bathers out in the hope they would dry before we had to pack them away into our suitcases.  Yep, and headed out onto the street for an hour or so for our last fix of the shops.

 

For our last dinner we headed back to the infamous Cheesecake factory. I chose orange chicken and it was so so. Chrissy won the jackpot but with her meal.  She ordered Bellagio Chicken (below is the link to the recipe for it).  This recipe needs to be shared with the world.

 

http://www.thecheesecakefactory.com/chefscorner/recipes/chicken_Bellagio

I could have left the pasta that was on the plate but the Bellagio chicken and it's sauce was just delish. 

 

After dinner, I went back to the room and the girls went off to a cutesy shop that Chris had found in the afternoon.  Purchases were made that night, right up to the nocker!! 

 

With final packing and organising etc. it was about 11pm before we went to bed.  Alarm is set for 4.45am tomorrow morning to head to the airport to meet our flight home. Sad, oh so sad...



 



Day 35 - Perfect Storm - Hawaiian Style

I woke this morning and went into the bathroom and noticed our hand washing from last night hanging in there (we had left it on the balcony when we went to bed).  I just thought oh that's nice one of the girls had put it away. 
When we were all awake this morning Shell says to Chris and I, "did you hear the storm last night?"
To which Chris and I replied "what storm?"
Shell said there was a storm with wind and rain belting in sideways on our balcony glass, she got up and brought our clothes inside (and she got wet in the process) and hung them in our bathroom, she said it had gone on for quite some time - Chris and I slept through it all and had no idea what had happened overnight. Very unlike me to sleep through something like that.

This was the first day that the beach 'plot' people didn't stake the claim on their bit of sand. Goes to show how bad the storm must have been over night as these beach plotters are very dedicated people.

We caught the Trolley today through down town Honolulu and we god dropped off at "Aloha Towers Marketplace".  Chris had been here once before many years ago on one her prior travels to Hawaii and apparently this had been quite a happening place. In 2014 this place is like a ghost town. There was one magnet shop which we don't think had any new stock since Chris was last there.  There was a gaudy bling shop which was chocka block with stock, I have no idea how that shop is still in business. 

There was one 'patisserie' that we went into to buy a bottle of water to douse my eye with (some thing had blown into it with the high winds).  This was possibly the weirdest shop I have ever been in.  These strange bears were out the front, why i'll never know? 

When we went into the shop - NO ONE was in it, we were yelling out "Hello" and "Is any one there" etc. There was condensation all down the windows it was warm in there and smelt very musty.  A couple of food items in a display cabinet. Not a good sign.  The owner was sitting at a table outside just watching us, we had been in there for a few minutes by this stage. He finally enters his shop and serves us. "That will be $1 for the water". All that was going through my head was, "geez mate, you're going to have to sell a hell of a lot of water to turn a profit".  We leave and proceed with the eye dousing which works a treat.

At this shopping centre is a 'Hooters', I am surprised that a franchise business had a presence in such a dead area.

We learnt that the Trolley is also on island time.  It is always late and never runs to schedule.  Rather than wait at the ghost town area we hailed a cab and headed to the next shopping precinct of which I've forgotten the name of, something 'warehouse'.  It had some cool funky shops that we just slowly ambled about.  There was one unreal kitchen shop that would leave Australia's 'Kitchen Warehouse' in it's dust.  I purchased the coolest potato peeler ever.  I am fussy about my potato peelers, so I will be very excited to test drive this baby.

On our way to dinner we passed a Polynesian display, with dancers, singing and music that was pretty cool to watch.  Hula Hula lessons.

We had dinner at an Italian restaurant which was across the way from the Polynesian show.  Of the whole time I was in America the wait staff at this restaurant were possibly the rudest I had experienced.  Even made that 'fake' waitress we had at Gordon Ramsay's restaurant in Vegas look sugary sweet.

Tonight was a big one, we were back in the room around 9.30pm!!

Day 34 - Dumb and Dumber - Hawaiian Style

Today we were up early to do some 'sight seeing', once again I use the term 'sight seeing' loosely as it also included a fair bit of shop wandering. But none the less, sight seeing was certainly included.

 

We woke to a bit of a windy morning (not up to Geraldton wind standards, but wind none the less) and headed down the road a little bit to catch our Waikiki Trolley (green line) to head up to Diamond Head and the look outs along the way. We were at the trolley pick up area early, so photo's were taken of the Duke statue and then we sat an waited for the trolley.  This my friends is where the hilarity of the day happened.

Strike a pose

I saw this young lad walking towards us, probably 21 or 22, my initial thoughts were, it takes commitment to have a permanent press iron line down the front of your jeans at that time of the morning and especially for such a young lad. Anyway he plonked himself on the chairs next to us, closest to poor Chris.  After a couple of minutes had passed he gets up with his funny little phone in his hand and says to Chris "does this text make sense to you without using any vowels?" She sort of reads it for a bit and says "oh yes"... It was something about his Uncle Keith and a gun, not really sure but. 

At this point Shell turns to me and says on the quiet "You know what, I am not the slightest bit surprised that this is going on right now" to which I got the giggles at, cause it's true, we always seem to attract these oddball characters that give us a great laugh and a story to tell.  Although I had to reign in the giggle as he had already spoken about a gun in the first sentence and he was odd enough that there is every possibility that he could have had a knife tucked in his commando boots or a gun in his bag. I was wise enough to realise this.

Front on, close up and with his haircut, he looks sort of like Lloyd Christmas (only with a ginger tinge), Jim Carey's character from the movie Dumb and Dumber. 

Shell asked him if she could take a photo of him to which he asked "Why, what website am I going to be on now?"  To which Shell relied "What do you mean now? How many websites have you been on?"

His answer was something like "The Europeans and the Asians love putting me on their websites, some American websites too" (to which I was thinking, what America's most wanted?).  There was more to this conversation while waiting for this trolley, there was erratic talk from him about library cards, bribery, Cuba, being robbed and stabbed in Panama, Florida drivers licences and passports and this was all from him in the space of about 4 minutes.  Then thank god our trolley turned up and we were out of there leaving the ginger headed Lloyd Christmas to find his next un-suspecting target to talk to. 

 

We got onto our trolley sat in quiet for a second or so, waited until we had  pulled away from the stop and all said at the same time "oh my god, what just happened?".  Poor Lloyd, he gave us ample to talk and laugh about.  Perhaps it is one of those location situations where you just had to be there to appreciate the pure gold it was. And by god, we certainly appreciated it. (This has all happened before 8.45am I might add).

The trolley took us up through the 'rich and famous' neighbourhood, I don't necessarily know about famous, but certainly rich.  There was one lady by the name of Doris Duke who had inherited over a billion dollars from her tobacco tycoon father. When she died in 1993 at 79 there were no living relatives and the house here in Hawaii was taken over by the government and is now a museum / tourist attraction. I think all her money went to charities.

We stopped at a nice look out and our funny tour guide these lovely photo of us.

 

From there we made our way onto a lovely local shopping centre had a late breakfast and a bit of a wander. After about 2 hours we jumped back onto the trolley which took us into the Diamond Head crater (a very old inactive volcano).  On the way to the crater we passed the Honolulu film studios where the modern day Hawaii-5-O is filmed.  Chris's dad Bernard kept on telling us we had to walk the crater cause he did it many years ago when he was in Hawaii.  Here is the photographic evidence of how totally nackered we were upon crater walk completion. Done and dusted.

 

 

And then it was back onto the trolley to rest our weary legs

 

View from Diamond Head

 

Check out the Japanese tour guide in her ensemble.

 

 

We came back to the hotel and did some house keeping (all important hand washing) as clothing was starting to get a light on.  Women's work is never done, even on holidays.  Then it was time for dinner, we went to Duke's restaurant at the bottom of our hotel, it was ok we just shared a couple of appetizers, certainly not the best meal we'd had.  But Dukes is famous for it's Hula Pie. Legend has it that this is what the sailors used to swim to shore for, I think they swam to shore for the ladies not the pie.

 

 

 

Day 33 - "I Have a Dream" Day

Today was a public holiday in the USA for Martin Luther King Day.  Our hotel is on a main busy tourist street and the hotel had signs up saying that the street would be closed between 9am and noon for the parade to celebrate.  At 10.30am we wandered out to watch some of the parade and as it turned out we were right at the tail end of it.  All we saw were a couple of 'low rider' cars (as seen in Hamish and Andy's 2011 USA Gap Year), the Hare Krishna's, a couple of police cars and that's it, the parade was finished and then came the every day traffic that was following and had caught up with the parade.  We did see a couple of fantastic sights that I must share with you. 

Sadly there are plenty of homeless in the USA and they all have signs politely asking for money for food, this rooster seems to live on the on one piece of pavement and his sign reads "why lie, I need money for beer and weed" Honesty is the best policy right???

This 4x rat tailed man - just because...

 

Here is one of the low riders in action (this photo doesn't do this piece of automotive engineering any favours - quite frankly it just looks like a boring car but it was far more than that when it was in action)

 

And this car, we don't know why but was just driving in reverse with it's boot open in the parade.

 

Finally we found a place for massages and they even had a sale with 40% off their massages, I was in massage heaven, poor Chris not so much.  Then when we left the massages we wandered for a bit and then finally we found a nail salon.  Shell and I were desperate for a pedicure (soles of my feet are now reminiscent of a babies bottom). Chris decided the pedicure wasn't for her and she went exploring.  Shell and I also got a show at this salon, it was gold.  This was an Asian owned and operated establishment that is a full service hair salon, and a huge part of their business is 'glamour photos'.

 

As it turns out there were 2 Japanese ladies having their hair and makeup done for their lovely glamour shots. Now these ladies who we assumed were friends as they left together never once smiled, never once talked to each other and certainly never laughed. We saw them all glammed up but couldn't take a photo of them as it was just far too obvious and rude on our part.  But honestly, their glamour photos are along these lines:

 

If you feel the need to see many other glam photo's and have a good laugh, here is the website: http://facesstudio.com/en/studio_glamour.php The lady who did Shell's pedicure was Vietnamese spoke perfect English and she was just lovely, of course my lady didn't speak a word of English.  The jack of all trades hairdressers / make up artists / photographers all rolled into one were even laughing once the Japanese ladies left (I wonder if they laughed at us when we left - probably did).  Sadly these Japanese ladies had their hair blow waved again before they left back to normal and they looked so much better than when they were tizzied up for the photo shoot.  This little story may not interest you but at the time we were having a great time watching all this go down.

 

Then we did an early "Duplex dinner" at the Cheesecake Factory.  This establishment is not as it seems and offers everything under the sun and not just Cheesecake. After dinner we roamed the streets checking out some local markets and we were in search of a special battery to place in the digi travel scales (so we know where we are up to with our suitcase weight allowance) which thus far had eluded us. But eureka, it was like striking gold, a battery was finally located and one suitcase has since been packed, weighed and put away never to be opened again until Australia!

 

Headed back to the hotel and we were back in our room around 8.15pm.

 

Day 32.2 - Not something you see every day

I spotted this from our room..

Pirates of the Hawaiian Islands maybe???

Day 32.1 - Lazy Dayz

Today was a down day.... not too much to report on.
We slept in and then went down stairs for breakfast. After breakfast I went for a wander to find a nail salon to no avail, I was only gone for about 40 minutes and then found the girls down stairs on their deck chairs sunning themselves. We chatted for a bit and then headed back up to the room. 

I stayed in the room for the afternoon resting up this lurgi and catching up on my blog entries. The girls went a wandering for a couple of hours.

At around 4pm the band started up on the deck below us and we gladly listened to it from our balcony, and we were ever so happy people watching and making up stories about what was going on.  At around 6.15 we decided to go and join the fun on the deck, we ordered a beer each and then at 6.30 the band finished and packed up (these Hawaiians don't know how to do a true 'Sunday Sesh"). Good timing on our part.... 

That little blue tent is where the band is belting it's tunes out from

I was fascinated by this lady in the black and white, she was as happy as Larry just having a dance all by herself, and she did it for ages all on her lonesome.  You go girl...

Then we went for Teppanyaki dinner which was very nice. And back in the room by about 8.45pm again.  So there you go, we needed a low key day and we got it.

Day 31 - On the road again

Being the adventurous types that we are (and you can tell just how adventurous we are considering how many times I've blogged as to how early we've been in bed), today we decided to do a road trip around the island.  Ideally we wanted to hire a driver and a car, but at $92 (+tax) an hour, we weren't interested in that.  Chrissy god bless her, volunteered to drive. So at 7am we are at the rental car place picking up our trusty Chevrolet Equinox SUV.

It was a bit of a group effort, Chris was the driver, Shelley the GPS operator and navigator, I was the back seat passenger telling Chris if it was (or was not) safe to change lanes etc. Between us all we got the job done, but really all the praise goes to Chris followed very closely by Shell for ferrying us around and returning us home safely.

The main object of the road trip was to tick a bucket list item off Chrissy's list.  To see the North Shore waves and surfers with a huge swell. Let me tell you, Chris was not disappointed with what she saw. At Sunset Beach there was some junior pro surfing competition going on and we watched that for a little while. We did joke and thought perhaps it's time to leave as we may have been perceived as creepy old ladies watching the young surfers.

Then we drove down the road a little bit to Pipeline Beach and watched for a little while there. There were plenty of people out with their massive lensed cameras. Although I hear that the waves and swell have been exceptional (what would I know, I'm only going by what I've heard!!) so I wondered if any of these photographers sell their photos to surfing magazines etc (probably do).

I don't know what constitutes a good surf photo from a bad one?  These 4 I thought looked OK, so I am happy to share with you.

 

 

I don't think this chap had a very successful day?

 

 

 Surf boards for sale

 

Now this is cool, check out the fire truck with the Long Boards on top

 

This little cutie pie had come along for some beach frivolity with his parents

 

 Check it out, Chris in her element

 

Then we pulled into the gorgeous little town of Heliewa (supposedly a famous town for the surfing fraternity in the know).  We also stopped at this little gem  called Kono's Pig for lunch.  The place was tiny but obviously big on popularity (the lady behind the counter did tell us that Kono's Pig was famous) we arrived just in time for once, but as we left there was a queue out the door and the place was packed.

 



Shell and I eating the famous Pulled Pork Sandwich

 

When we left Haliewa I can't tell you what happened.  I needed a bit of shut eye, I'd woken with a bit of a stuffed up head (thanks to the bastards on the plane, we had quite a coughy plane ride to Hawaii, it seemed as though every one was couhing) so I assume I picked up some kind of dreaded lurgie from the plane and I needed to rest.  I woke up somewhere around this little island called Chinaman's Hat for obvious reasons. Where a bit of photo tom foolery was just begging to happen.

 

 

 



We continued on around this beautiful island taking in the sights, I have included some pics for your pleasure:

 

We arrived back to drop off the hire care around 4.30pm.  We felt as if we had driven from Geraldton to Perth and return, but in actuality, speed limit was 35 miles per hour (round that to 56km/hr), we had only travelled 130km for the entire day.  It was a long day and Chris was stoked to get out from behind the drivers wheel, the pressure was finally off for her (wrong side of car and wrong side of road driving).

 

We headed home, decompressed for a little bit and then tried to find somewhere for dinner.  Long weekend here so the place is packed.  We ended up at some dodgy Chinese restaurant, food was nice, the service was terrible, they had automatically included the price of the tip on the bill, we counted that tip out to the exact cent. We weren't prepared to give them an extra cent.  Late night tonight, we were back in the hotel room about 8.50pm!!!