Aloha from Hawaii! We arrived in Honolulu on Saturday, after a pretty uneventful flight (if you don't count the time I spent trapped in the bathroom during some extreme turbulence). We're stopping over in Honolulu for the night, then it's a morning flight to Kauai for a week of vacation. It's Ski Week in Palo Alto, so school is closed so that kids can escape from the oppressively mild weather of Northern California to go get their fair share of frostbite and hot chocolate. Since Frank and I escaped Michigan and Ohio as soon as we were old enough to drive, that holds about as much appeal as getting a daily colonoscopy. We've opted to use the precious school vacation time to visit our favorite islands, for some fun and hopefully some sun.
Arriving in the Honolulu Airport is a bit confusing, and since there seems to be law here against proper signage, we spent about 45 minutes looking for our baggage claim carousel. We finally found it, but the thing had not even started up. Alex became entranced by a nearby trolley selling leis, and wound up with an orange lei and head piece made of silk flowers. He wore his orange flower headpiece over his Texas Longhorns baseball cap, which made for an interesting ensemble. He charmed the lei-seller with an impromptu and spirited hula, made up on the spot just for the occasion.
Eventually, our bags emerged and we loaded everything onto the Hertz shuttle bus. We found our car and discovered that it was a red Ford Mustang convertible. "Is this a Ferrari?" Alex asked excitedly.
"No, this is a Ford. This car wants to be a Ferrari when it grows up." I quipped.
Alex threw me a quizzical look, then said, "It's the coolest car ever!"
Coolest car ever or not, the car had one significant short-coming--almost no trunk space. We're veteran travelers, so we know better than to over-pack, but our 3 suitcases would not fit into the trunk, no matter what. Frank's large duffel bag wound up strapped in with a seatbelt into the back seat, so that it would fall over and crush Alex or suddenly lunge forward and cause Frank to have a traumatic brain injury if we happened to stop short.
We drove with the top down for a bit, until a little cloudburst forced us to put it up. "Little cloudburst" is code for "six year old backseat tyrant screaming bloody murder when being hit by a few raindrops." We made our way Hilton Hawaiian Village at Waikiki, our resting place for the night. Frank made a few suggestions for things we might do for the evening...trip to Diamond Head to see the waves? Eat a Jameson's famous beachfront restaurant? Explore the USS Arizona Memorial?
We got to our room, which featured an ocean view and a view of Diamond Head and opted for "none of the above" and decided to "hang loose" instead. It was after 2:00, so most of the hotel restaurants were closed, so we decided to have room service. Frank nearly had to revive me after I saw the menu, which included a chicken Caesar salad for $29.95, a cheeseburger for $29.65, and child's menu that started at $12.99 hotdog and increased from there.
I thought to myself that we should either start our diets right now, or go down and see if there were any $5 vending machines we could scavenge for pretzels. When I balked at the prices, Frank said, "Don't worry. The room is free."
Frank, who knows how to manipulate the system when it comes to traveling on a budget, had cashed in some Hilton Honors points and secured this room for free. Score one for the big guy! We ordered the room service, partly out of curiosity to see what a $25 salad would be like. It turned out not to be that great. The sandwiches were cold and the fries were hard and mostly inedible. The salad was limp and had very little dressing or taste to it. As much as I liked the room and the grounds of the Hilton Hawaiian Village, I'd skip the room service next time and go across the street to Round Table Pizza, or better yet, McDonald's.
After lunch, Alex was begging us to go to the beach. Frank agreed, since the beach was about 20 yards from the hotel, and I decided to engage in my all-time favorite vacation activity: the afternoon nap. Nothing says "leisure time" to me that not having to be anywhere or do anything and just taking a little siesta before the evening round of shopping and eating begins. They don't call this paradise for nothing.
Alex and Frank returned from their beach excursion and Alex was excited that he had gotten to try boogie boarding on a rented boogie board. Alex would probably spend the whole day in the water if we let him, and eventually he would grow gills like those people in Water World. He's part boy, part fish and will not voluntarily leave the water until he is wrinkled up and shrunken to be the size of a Bratz doll, or is threatened with a time out that will last until he's 30. He left the water voluntarily with dreams of shopping for trinkets, since shopping seems to be the only thing he's more fond of than water.
We made a reservation for dinner and set out to kill some time by walking down through the shopping plaza attached to the Hilton Hawaiian Village. Alex bought a little red ukulele, which he used to make up songs about Honolulu like, "When I left you/In Honolulu/The sun was shining/Then it rained." I think he liked the sound of the word "Honolulu," because we were treated to several little ditties like this one.
We strolled down to our dinner destination, the terribly unauthentic, un-Hawaiian Benihana. We opted for this because I thought that Alex would appreciate the knife show. After the disappointing lunch, at least we knew we were in for some decent food and entertainment. We can be such tourist geeks sometimes.
Since we are a small family, we were seated with two other groups around the large grill, waiting for the chef. We were seated with a young man who told us he was in the Navy and his girlfriend, and two congenial, friendly Australian businessmen en route to a conference in Maui. The Australians kept the conversation lively, and asked the Navyman about what he did and where he'd been. He was on shore leave and would deploy again in 3 weeks, this time to the Persian Gulf. This news left me a little sad, because even though I don't know this guy from Adam's house cat, he seemed like such a nice young man, like so many other nice young men and women out there now. You can call it a "surge" or whatever euphemism you want, but the sad reality is that this young man and 20,000 other fresh-faced kids trying to make something of themselves are putting themselves in harm's way.
Alex started to get sleepy, and with that, a little cranky. He was not thrilled with the chef's knife skills, and to be honest, neither was I. Some of the Benihana chefs are great showmen, and seem to love the kitschy performance part of the show. Ours had an attitude like, "Here's me, chopping vegetables, for you stupid tourists." There is a lot of that kind of attitude on this island. The service is not bad, it just comes with a sort of bored indifference, a sort of whatevah, what's your hurry, man? It's not the open hostility that you find in other parts of the world, but it's far from the warmth and graciousness, the spirit of Aloha that's widely touted.
Alex eventually fell asleep at the table before the meat was cooked, so he ate very little, but nothing could rouse him. He's done this in restaurants all over the world, just keeled over when jet lag and too much excitement got the best of him. He slept through the rest of the meal, but we were able to wake him up in time to walk back to the hotel. The only thought on his mind was the Lappert's Ice Cream that I promised him earlier in the night, so we made our way there for a cone and then it was back to the hotel for bed. Alex normally doesn't eat ice cream for dinner, but hey, the kid is on vacation, right?
