It was twenty-one years in the making, but I finally took Laralee to Hawai’i for a belated “honeymoon”. Due to a lapse in judgement, I completely missed the fact that we’d be taking off on our flight from Denver to Honolulu during the solar eclipse! Unfortunately our seats were in the middle of the Boeing 777, which means this was quite literally my view of the eclipse out the window:
So all we could really see was that it was slightly more dim outside. What a bummer.
Still, we made the best of the seven-hour flight. Here we are as our journey began (this probably isn’t my best side):
And here are Megan and Kurt, our awesome friends who decided it would be kind of cool to spend a week with us:
We landed at 2:30pm local time, which was 6:30pm Denver time, and since airlines don’t provide food any more (unless you want to pay $12 for a mostly-burnt “cheeseburger”), we were pretty hungry. But we had to pick up a car and drop in on the hotel. Here’s the view from our balcony, overlooking downtown Honolulu:
And yet another selfie:
We hopped in the car and started navigating Honolulu looking for a restaurant, but soon realized there’s pretty much nowhere to park. Since there seemed to be a gazillion restaurants and tourist-ey shops within a half-mile radius of our hotel, we decided to drive back and leave the car at the hotel while we explored the city on foot. It was a beautiful evening, and we eventually settled for a meal at the Cheesecake Factory.
After dinner we walked along a half-mile of Waikiki Beach. The sun had just set (although it was only about 6:30 local time) and it was gorgeous. When I’ve walked in the Pacific Ocean in the past, the water’s always been cold. Not so here… it was nice and warm.
Behind Laralee is the curve of the beach, including some of the densely-packed hotels that line it, and far in the distance is Diamond Head, which we plan to hike in the coming days.
The surfers who’d been floating a bit offshore early in the day had left, and the water was mostly calm.
There was a catamaran just coming ashore, and I liked the backlighting of the now-vanished sun:
I can see how this place could grow on you. I’m looking forward to another week out here!