So, for the past four and a half days, Dana and I have been in Hawaii. I figured I'd better start writing stuff down before the details escape me, so here goes.
On Friday morning we set off - our flight was on time and left Philadelphia at about 6:30am. Dana and I had picked up a rental car the day before that was scheduled to be dropped off that morning, so there was no problem getting there. We had some issues with the boarding passes of the second flight - apparently they weren't ready to print them off, as they had some issues with the plane. We arrived in San Francisco a little before ten and ran into a nice line of people waiting at the gate for their boarding passes. Joy.
Anyway, eventually we got onboard the Boeing 777 bound for Honolulu. Dana managed to again sleep through the majority of the flight, leaving me to entertain myself with stupid cell phone games and podcasts. It didn't seem that long, though when we landed it felt more like 7pm than 1pm for obvious reasons.
The rental counter was full of my coworkers and thus took forever to get through. We drove to the hotel and eventually found the way in - I gave my keys to the valet and we headed over to check in. Initially we got a room with two double beds, but thankfully we managed to get it changed to a king right then. We were placed in the Kalia tower, pretty much the second lowest rung on the Hilton Hawaiian Village totem pole - not to say it's bad in the least, though.
View from one end of the room
View from the tenth floor at night
Rainbow!
We're on the tenth floor and have a view of the inland, but it's still pretty beautiful, construction site or no. Anyhow, we got in and relaxed for the most part the first evening. We walked around a little and settled on the food court in the International Marketplace. It was mainly filled with tourists, but the Chinese noodle/chicken plate was acceptable. For dessert we got pineapple ice cream and then head back to the hotel.
The next day I had to head into work for about four hours - it was mostly shuttling stuff back and forth from the office and moving heavy things. It went quickly, and when I returned Dana and I were off to Diamond Head to climb up quick, which would leave plenty of time to go out for a nice dinner. We hiked up fairly quickly and took some pretty great pictures of Waikiki and the rest of the island:
Waikiki from the top of Diamond Head
Looking out toward the ocean
More Waikiki
Dana!
We headed back down the mountain and went to dinner with four of my coworkers at a place called Gyu Kaku, where I had arranged 6:30 reservations. It wasn't far from the hotel and I've been there before - it's great for groups of people. You order several little platters of about three ounces each of variously spiced and sauce-slathered meats and you cook them yourself on the grill in the center of the table. We ended up showing up right at the end of "happy hour," where many of the entres are half-priced. We were able to order plenty, and about an hour later we were stuffed with steak and beef.
Well, that's it for the first part of the weekend - I'll write about Sunday a bit later. It involves snorkeling, some North Shore fun, and lots of delicious sunburn.
