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Hawaii Vacation - 2007

27 August 2007

Day 2 (8/27)

Still on Pacific Standard time, we woke up fairly early and wanted a hearty Hawaiian style breakfast so we went to Big City Diner at Ward Center where I had the fried rice, and L had scrambled eggs, Portuguese sausage and rice. Yum!  We went back to our hotel and this time L's friends picked us up and we headed out to the leeward side of the island to Ko'olina to go snorkeling.  This time I was prepared and had all of my equipment, including new swim trunks.  Actually, L bought me a really nice snorkeling set for the trip, but the fancy goggles were defective so I had to settle for my old set that I brought along (which was a birthday gift from a couple years back.  This was the first time in almost 20 years that I had gone snorkeling, so it was practically a new experience for me.  We drove around to the different man-made coves at the Ko'olina resort trying to find some parking, but gave up and we got dumped off at one parking lot while L's friend went to find parking elsewhere.  There were some dark clouds floating around and a few sprinkles, but the rains never came, although the cloud cover made the temps very comfortable.  And since this was already off-season and the local kids were in school, we practically had the area to ourselves!  We had a good time looking around and we actually saw lots of fish and a turtle in the water, about 10 feet or less beneath us! 

It was well past our lunch time so we needed to get some grub for the 5 of us, so a quick text message to the Mouji boy back in LA and he suggested Jurison's Inn at the Waikele outlets in Waipahu.  Very tasty plate lunches and they had some interesting variations on it.  Some of the different dishes they had were the Furikake chicken and hibachi tofu. 

Next up we were on our quest for more of the best of Hawaiian shave ice, so taking the advice of one of L&S's friends, we went looking for this place called Ice Garden in Aiea.  I looked up the address on my Treo and we headed over there trying to find it.  The addresses in Hawaii are somewhat different for these multi-flat business buildings, so when we tried to find the place we were walking all over this one shopping center trying to find it.  We even asked a couple of the locals there if they had heard of it and most hadn't, except for one fireman (who only there to do an inspection.. thought he was a security guard!) said that maybe it was across the street.  The address didn't match but it did say Aiea Shopping Center.  So, after about 15 minutes of searching (mostly on foot) we finally found it.  It's a little tiny shop at the end of a business building that has maybe 6 seats at the counter. They have a wide selection of toppings and they serve it in a big bowl to eat with a spoon, so it's more civilized than using your mouth off of a cone.  Their mochi balls are made fresh daily and you can sure tell the difference.  They even have one with flan on top, that S tried out.  All-in-all it was some pretty good shave ice although maybe not worth that much effort to find it. After having filled our tummies with lots of goodies, we took a nap back at our hotel room after we got dropped off. 

We had hoped to take a walk on the beach or visit one of a number of restaurants for dinner, but we over-slept and didn't really have time for anything since we were going up to the planetarium to watch the lunar eclipse.  So, we just stopped at Rainbow Drive-in for some fast food.  I got the mahi-mahi sandwich and L got the Rainbow special burger with fries.  We figured that we'd get hungry later in the evening from star-gazing, so we stopped by Leonard's for some malasadas, of course!

At around 9:30 we picked up S's hubby (it was too late for their little girl) and headed up to the Bishop museum to catch the eclipse.  There were quite a few people camped outside and we waited in line to see some show in the planetarium (we thought we'd get to see the eclipse, but it was only a lecture on future space exploration and the next planned lunar landing).  Then we spent the rest of the night trying to take photos of the eclipse with our handheld digital cameras, with much difficulty.  They had several telescopes set up to see the moon, but the lines were long and we just tried to do our best with our cameras.  The clouds were rolling around and there was a little drizzle, but mostly we got to see the moon go from it's full brightness to a deep orange when it was fully covered by the earth's shadow.  We stayed up until about midnight but it was worth it to see this unusual natural phenomena. 

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