Day 343, Aloha from Oahu!

Greetings from the Island of Oahu! Today began with a 3:45am wake up call. Aye aye aye..... but it was worth all the effort. Ron and I flew over to Oahu for an all-day tour of the island. It was awesome. We spent most of our time along the North Shore areas....saw the LDS temple, BYU Hawaii, the Polynesian Cultural Center, the Dole Plantation, and the Pipeline, to name a few. I was blown away by the lush landscape and local flavor of the area.

The Polynesian Cultural Center (PCC,) stunned me. I was not expecting such a huge place with so much going on throughout the day. We were there for about 3 hours, and could easily have spent more time.

The shows we saw were fun....and the canoe parade was awesome. They had dancers from Tahiti, Fiji, Hawaii, Samoa, Tonga, and New Zealand. These dancers are the ones from Samoa....they were one of my favorite.

The PCC is surrounded by some of the prettiest landscape---waterfalls, flowers, trees--it's simply breathtaking. Everywhere I looked I wanted to take pictures....I had my phone camera in one hand (because that's the fastest way for me to get pictures on my blog,) and my digital camera in the other. You could say I was a bit excited. We went on a canoe tour of the grounds which gave us a great sampling of the various cultural backgrounds.

Before we got to the PCC, we stopped at the Dole Pineapple Plantation. I am embarrased to admit this, but I kind of sort of thought pineapples grew underground. How dumb is that? I was shocked when I saw pineapples growing in bushes :)

One of the biggest highlights of my day was Pearl Harbor. It was actually our first stop on the tour. I really needed about another hour there in order to soak it all in, and there is a lot to soak in! This caused a stirring of some negative emotions in me... I was surprised by how angry I felt about the attack on Pearl Harbor, and I had an intense feeling of sadness...a foreboding, that is difficult to describe in words. It was eerie standing on the Arizona Memorial and looking down at the actual ship, knowing that there are bodies entombed there. I knew about the oil and the bubbles, people have told me about that for years, but I did not realize I would be able to see the ship. I thought about Art O'Keefe and all his stories about that day. It is amazing to have known someone who was actually a first hand witness of that day. He was only 15 years old, and watched it all from the deck of a neighboring ship.

All in all, this was a fabulous day.... Tiring and long... but fabulous! It's an experience I will never forget.