Aloha from the beautiful island of Oahu! It's been over 10 years since I've been here and it's just delightful - I'm definitely not going to wait another 10 years to come back.
Yesterday we toured the Arizona Memorial at Pearl Harbor and the USS Missouri Memorial, both of which were fascinating and very moving. I was surprised to learn that after 71 years since the attack in 1941, there are 13 Pearl Harbor survivors still living. When a survivor dies, if the family wishes, the Navy will conduct a memorial service out on the white Arizona memorial structure, then send a diver with the cremated remains down under the water. The specially packaged remains are then inserted into a crack in the Arizona, allowing the veteran to be interred with his fallen comrades for all eternity.
On the Missouri, I was most intrigued to see the actual site of the Japanese surrender, which brought World War II to an end. My favorite tidbit: As they were setting up for the ceremony on the deck of the Missouri, apparently General Douglas MacArthur arranged for the tallest soldiers and sailors on the ship to be lined up along the pathway where the Japanese officials would walk - one last bit of in-your-face intimidation for the much-shorter representatives from Japan.
On a much lighter note, we purchased inflatable rafts at the local ABC store, and since I have pretty good lungs, I figured it would be no big deal to take a few deep breaths and blow mine up. Ha! I gave it a good shot but eventually caved and asked the nice young man at the activities shack for help. It took him about 7 seconds to inflate my raft using his cool compressed air machine, and he charged me $5.25, which was more than I paid for the actual raft. Quite the racket he's got going, but who cares. I was ready to hit the waves.
In other raft news, my b-i-l Kevin kindly let a stranger at the beach "borrow" my sister's raft, for what was supposed to be a few minutes. The next thing we knew the guy's floating in the direction of Tahiti and the raft was never seen again.
Hawaii, as always, is delightfully multi-cultural. On our guided tour to the Arizona/Missouri memorials, I was struck by the diverse make-up of our group. In addition to Americans from Oregon, Illinois and Pennsylvania, there were visitors from Australia, Canada and even Bulgaria. Hawaii must have become a big vacation destination down under because I'm hearing a lot of Australian accents, which I don't remember from the last time I was here.
Apparently the Hilton Hawaiian Village, where we're staying, is frequently used as a set for Hawaii Five-O. We haven't seen Alex O'Loughlin, shirt on or shirt off, yet, but we're keeping our eyes peeled.
Final thought for now: I really like spray-on sunscreen. It makes it so much easier to "grease up" then the messy cream in a tube.
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