Let's go to Macy's

2/11 Honolulu.

Today we arrived in Honolulu. We left the ship after leaving the cabin, without stopping for breakfast. In the terminal it was easy to grab a cab, and we headed to the airport to pick up our rental car. Because the discount code didn’t allow me to enter my Preferred number, it took a bit longer than I would have liked to rent the car, but we were soon on our way to the Pearl mall, near the airport. The GPS got a bit confused at one exit, and we found ourselves heading onto one of the navel bases here. We were able to U turn and eventually found the mall.

The part of the mall we went into had SBC coffee and Sears. We stopped for coffee and asked if there was another department store. The barista told us there was a Macy’s in the other part of the mall. We could get there by Monorail (50 cents each way), or walk. After a stroll through a parking lot that went nowhere, we found the mall.

Glen found the clothes he needed fairly quickly, and as we were checking out, the clerk asked where we were going. We said the North Shore, so she said we had try Matsumoto’s Shave Ice.

As we were leaving the mall (and grabbing some card blanks at the Starbucks there) I got a text from my friend Don, asking if we could meet him at the interisland terminal at the airport. So, back to the airport we went. We had a nice 30 minute chat, and then he left for Maui.

We left the airport, and headed to the North Shore. We went through the same confusing interchange, but this time we knew what we were supposed to do.

Our first stop was the Dole Pineapple Plantation. It’s very much a tourist destination, more so than the coffee and Guava farms we’d visited in Kauai on our last visit. There is a maze, a garden tour and a train, but all are an extra charge. We did walk through their pineapple exhibit and stopped for a pineapple soft serve, but it’s not someplace we’re likely to ever visit again.

Once we were done there, we used our phone to find the Shave Ice place. It was about 7 miles away in Haleiwa. We programmed the GPS, and headed down the road.

Traffic there was somewhat busy, lots of cars and people. We found the place, a general store with a long line for the ice. We parked, and joined the line, which wasn’t all that long. There were 40 flavors, and I did a fruit combo and Glen mixed green tea and root beer. If you don’t know what shave ice is, it’s like a snow cone, but the ice is shaved thin, so completely absorbs the syrup. It was yummy.

After that we decided to have a late lunch. I went to Yelp and Urban Spoon on my phone, and after walking for a bit, we settled on the Grass Skirt grill, a small and homey restaurant. We enjoyed a nice lunch and would go back.

Following that, we continued along the road until we found a beach. We parked, wandered and took some pictures. After that, we headed back into Honolulu to return the car.

That went smoothly. We had to take a shuttle from the car rental agency to the terminal to get a cab, and we chatted with a couple who were heading home to NY after a few weeks. They told us that the storm in the Pacific (same one that changed our itinerary) had also broken the mast of a father and his two sons sailing from Vancouver to Hawaii. They sent a distress call, and a tanker 120 miles away heard it and headed over. The boat sank, but all aboard were rescued.

The cab ride back to the ship was quick and Glen headed on board while I shopped. At Matsumoto’s I bought one niece a tee shirt, (she’d been texting me about something else, so I asked what she wanted and she said a cool tee), so I bought T-shirts for her sisters.

After I got on board, Glen and I headed up to the lounge for a bit, and then he relaxed while I went to a show in the theatre – this was a 3 guitar local group with their wives dancing hula. I sat with my tablemates Jack and Mary, and we all decided it was OK but not great.

After the show I went upstairs to change for dinner. Because it was so close to dinnertime, we were almost 15 minutes late. Jack and Mary were there by themselves waiting. Apparently they’d told Natalie that we’d be showing up eventually. Tonight, Frank and Wendy weren’t there, but Grace and Joey were. Last night they’d had a snack late, so went to dinner in Anytime later.

After dinner we headed to Explorer’s where the patter said Indigo would be playing. The lounge was deserted. One of the bar tenders said he thought they were playing the deck party. He called up there, and found out they were. Another couple walked in looking for them, and said they had been playing, but now it was the hula class demonstrating. (Oops, maybe I should have been there).

We decided to head up to the deck party. When we got there it was group version of YMCA. Indigo was there, and just starting up. They then did a conga line, which we joined. Once Indigo started playing we tried to dance, but they were on the smoking side, so we headed to the far corner of the non smoking side, and listened for a while.

A few minutes later, they announced we were leaving, so Glen and I headed to the promenade deck to watch sail away. To our surprise, the front of the promenade (on deck 8) was open, so we watched from there. We stayed up there through the entire sail out of Honolulu. After that, we decided to see if the band was still in the Wheelhouse. They were gone, so we practiced tango for a bit, and then went to bed.