Hi Guys,
Honolulu Oahu 19 - 20 March 2011
(Latitude: 21 17’North Longitude: 157 53’ West)
(Time -10 GMT)
We pull into Honolulu knowing that we will be leaving the ship for a few days. We have packed our bags and we are ready to go but we have decided to complete the Pearl Harbor excursion before we leave. The visit to Pearl Harbor is an emotional trip down memory lane for Americans; however, the buses from the Aurora are full of Brits. The attack on Pearl Harbor was at 7 am on Sunday the 7th December 1941.The park service has wonderfully choreographed the event with movie clips from the period. The movie presents the diplomatic events leading up to the attack and the attack of 187 planes that came in the first wave and 164 in the second wave from 6 aircraft carriers and sank 21 ships in Pearl Harbor with the loss of 1174 service personnel lives and over 2,000 people from Hawaii. The Arizona memorial is formed from one of the battleships that was sunk on battleship row. The Arizona still leaks oil to this day. We move from the movie theater to the Arizona memorial by launch. We learn later that the afternoon wind was too high and no one could visit the memorial. We felt we were very lucky.
We return to the Aurora and pick up our two bags filled with clothing and presents and we make our way to Waikiki beach and the Hyatt Regency. We use a taxi that happened by for $3 a head, there are 3 on board; however, the charge should have been much more. We choose the 29th floor in the tower facing Diamond Head and Waikiki beach, just superb.
We are only here overnight as we leave at 11 am for the airport and San Jose in California where Ash and Heather will pick us up tomorrow night. Before we go out for dinner, the hotel learns that we are on the cruise for our 50th wedding anniversary and the send up a bottle of champagne. At the mall I buy a new Sony camera as the flash on my current one has stopped working. We are up early the next morning and after some photos we head for the airport and 5 hours and 3 hours time change later we are in California. We are not pleased with the huge temperature change (28C/82F to 12C/58F) and the continuous rain that we learn has been going on for about a month.
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| The Arizona Memorial |
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| King Kamahamaha |
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| Queens palace used for Hawaii Five-O |
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| Honolulu Harbor in the rain |
The 1,600 mile long chain of eight islands that forms the Hawaiian archipelago was born between 25 and 40 million years ago. The Pacific Plate moves inexorably northwest and like a conveyer belt carries each of the newly formed islands further away from the stationary source of the volcanic activity beneath the plate and the future generation of new islands.
The Islands for the Polynesian People, as distinct from the islands for the Micronesian and Melanesian peoples, can be enclosed by a triangle marked by the Hawaiian Islands to the north, New Zealand to the west and Easter Island to the east
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