Well Alooooha!

Aloha from the Hawaiian Islands! For the next two weeks, my blogs will be coming from these isolated islands of intrigue and adventure and hopefully I can provide some interesting things to read about. Anyway, on with the show!

Backstory: Around a year ago, my Dad began talking to his sister Nancy (my aunt and commonly called Nan for short) about the possibility of trading houses for a period of time this summer. Nan expressed an interest in being in Minnesota for an extended period to visit with family and friends and see sights she hadn't seen in a long while. We all promptly threw our hands in the air, screamed "WOOPEE!", and began plotting ways to make this experiment in short term real estate swapping a reality. Sufffice to say it worked out, which means that at this very moment, Nan and her significant other Chuck are currently occupying our palace in Brooklyn Park while I digitally scribble my thoughts from a slightly more exotic locale.

Yesterday the fam (Dad, Mom, and Andrew) left Minneapolis at around 3:15 PM for the island of Oahu, approximately an eight hour plane flight on a Northwest DC-10. The flight was one of the more miserable flights I have had, settling right behind my flight to Michigan last fall (2 hour delay with a SCREAMING baby) and my return flight from Las Vegas when I was 16 (hot pot of coffee dumped on my head, then offered my choice of red or white wine as retribution). It took off late, had crabby flight attendants who didn't feed us, poor storage, and a crying baby (though not screaming, thank goodness). As advertised, the flight took right around eight hours to get to Oahu and touched down with one of the smoothest landings I can remember experiencing. We grabbed our bags and hopped into a taxi to get to Nancy's house, which turned into a rather exciting in unexpected adventure since the cab driver found a way to violate just about every traffic law ever enacted. Oh well, we survived.

After settling in a bit, we consulted my trusty Lonely Planet guide for a place to eat. For those that don't know, I'm something of a Lonely Planet junky, especially after my trip to Oz, and consider their advice gospel. The fam and I decided on a small Sichuan place called Maple Garden that sounded excellent and set off to navigate the mean streets of Honolulu in my aunt's fast and furious Honda Civic. I was elected driver since I was considered the calmest of the available candidates and I got us to our destination with only a few minor snafus. Dinner was good, came home, watched some Lost (greatest show EVER!), wrote in the journal, thought about Megs for a bit, and hit the hay. Not bad for a first day.

Today we went to breakfast at this little place called Anna Millers which had good pancakes and great coffee (Kona, mmm). After that, we went to the Pearl Harbor memorials, most notably the USS Arizona Memorial. This is the battleship that was sunk during the surprise attack on December 7th and still leaks oil to the surface. It's one of the more impressive war memorials I have seen and has great information all around. We took a ton of pictures at the ajoining submarine park, but skipped the actual tour of the sub ($10 each was just a little too steep to walk around a cramped compartment with a bunch of buttons we couldn't touch). All in all, Pearl Harbor was fairly impressive, but the boat ride out to the Arizona, the main attraction, was quite ironically the most disappointing part of the whole thing. It's a cool concept to be sure, but the fact remains that there just isn't that much to be seen out there and the glare from the water makes what is there difficult to see. The rest of the day we chilled out and made our plans for tomorrow's trip to Kauai and the ensuing four day excursion we will be making on that particular organic oasis. kauai should be a great time and I'm really stoked to do a bunch of the different hikes on the island.

Alright, that's enough for now. Aloha.