Last Day on Oahu

Tuesday, February 18, 2020

Forecast for today:  10% chance of rain.  I guess that means something different here - it rained all morning.  Our raincoats were sitting nice and dry back at the condo.  Good thing we had indoor activities planned for the morning.

We got another day pass with the bus, and started at the Bishop Museum, which had a lot of Hawaiian natural and cultural history, and science.

We had the place to ourselves, until the big school group arrived.

This is us in infrared:

After we left the Bishop Museum, we were curious to see the statue of King Kamehameha because they always show a shot of it in Hawaii 5-0.  We thought it was in front of Iolani Palace, but it turns out the statue is across the road.  King Kamehameha is the monarch who founded the kingdom of Hawaii in 1810.  The monarchy was overthrown in 1893 by rich businessmen who resisted the restoration of the powers of the monarchy. 

So what is this building, then?  We checked it out, and it is Aliiolani Hale, home to the Hawaii State Supreme Court.  We looked for the Hawaii 5-0 headquarters, but it must be in a different section of the building ha ha.

While we were here, we thought we would tour Iolani Palace, but there was an hour wait to get in, blech. 

After lunch at the condo, the sun came out and we had extra time, so we hopped a bus to Ala Moana Center, a lovely shopping center with very high end ritzy shops with bored looking salespeople.  Well, we weren't going in there!  

We asked if there was a pond with fish.  The Information Center guy said we wouldn't see any fish.  We did see these fish:

And then we found out that there were fish in the pond.  In fact, this papa fish was almost 3 feet long!

From the mall we walked to Kewalo Basin Harbor. We see this harbor a lot during shots of Hawaii 5-0.

imagecredit:https://www.bizjournals.com/pacific/news/2015/11/04/hawaii-agency-delays-decision-on-redevelopment-of.html

We showed up right on time for our parasail booking, and were told it was cancelled due to the windy conditions.  

That gave us 2 hours to kill.  Anton said "Shave Ice", so we made it a mission to find some.  Shave Ice is a dessert made by shaving a block of ice, then adding flavoured syrups:

Then we had a 2 hour Sunset Catamaran Dinner Cruise, which left from the same harbor.

The dinner cruise was very casual and it rained half the time, so we split our time between being outside to combat Anton's queasiness, and inside to get out of the rain.  And yes, we had our raincoats with us this time!  The weather did make for some dramatic shots:

Let's just say we won't be in a hurry to do another catamaran tour for awhile!