Our 50th State, My 48th

Yep, I made it to my 48th state, Hawaii.  It was just a quick stop on Oahu.  For a long time I had been thinking about combining Hawaii with a trip to Australia.  There are only a handful of US cities that have flights to Australia.  I'm pretty sure that most Americans who go to Australia go from Los Angeles.  Los Angeles to Sydney is a 15 hour flight.  Anywhere else on the mainland is going to be longer (unless there are flights from San Diego).  Honolulu to Sydney is 10 hours and 45 minutes.  A long flight to be sure, but not as bad as 15+ hours.

So I was only in Hawaii for one full day and parts of two others.  Of the 47 states I had been to already, most of my trips had something to do with sports.  Even if I didn't go to a game, I made it to a few states as part of a trip to a game somewhere else (like when I got to Maine last summer after going to a Red Sox game at Fenway Park).  But Hawaii is not the place to go for professional sports.  Only Hawaii, Alaska, and Wyoming have no professional baseball teams (and I made it to Wyoming when I went to Denver to cross Coors Field off the list).  It would be kind of cool to go to a Hawaii football game and see the stadium where Jimmy Clausen and Golden Tate ended the bowl losing streak, but I was too early for that.  Still, I found plenty to do in my short time in Honolulu.

On my first day, I didn't have much planned.  I got to my hotel around 4:00, which was 10:00 my time.  I was pretty tired, but I did want to adjust to the time at least a little. I also wanted to go to Hawaii before Australia because it would help adjust to the time difference in Australia.  Sydney is 20 hours ahead of Hawaii, which is the same as being 4 hours behind, not too bad (as opposed to being 14 hours ahead of New York, which is the same as being 10 hours behind).  So anyway, the first thing I did after checking into my hotel was take a walk to the beach.  It was a short walk from my hotel.  I had a view of Diamond Head from the beach.  I walked around the beach for a little bit and then just went in up to my knees.  After the beach, I took a walk to the Waikiki Brewing Company.  I might have had Hawaiian beer before, but I definitely hadn't had a Hawaiian beer at an outdoor bar in Hawaii.  I had a burger for dinner and to drink I had their amber ale and their seasonal.  I liked the amber ale better.  By the way, how does a Hawaiian brewery do seasonals?  They don't have seasons in Hawaii.

It was hot when I was in Hawaii, but there was pretty much always a pleasant breeze.

I liked the other beer I had better, but the lighter beer made for a better picture.

The second day was my only full day there and it was the highlight of my time in Hawaii.  I went to Pearl Harbor.  You can reserve tickets online in advance, but they were sold out by the time I tried to do that.  They do have a limited number of tickets each morning.  I asked at my hotel how early I should get there.  They told me 6:30 (it doesn't open until 7:00).  That was fine with me, especially since I wasn't totally adjusted to the time difference.  So I got there a little before 6:30 and there were some people on line already, but not too many.  There's a ton to see at Pearl Harbor.  I spent about eight hours there.

What everybody wants to see is the USS Arizona Memorial.  And that's what sells out (or runs out, tickets are free to see that).  There's other stuff to see that you can pretty much go to whatever you want, but you have to go to the Arizona Memorial by boat and those spots fill up.  I was able to get on the first boat.  First you see a 20 minute movie about the attack.  Then you get on the boat to go to the Arizona.  I learned a whole lot during my time at Pearl Harbor.  First of all, the US was not ready for the attack.  The military leaders at Pearl Harbor were more worried about sabotage from the Japanese population in Hawaii so they took steps to prepare for that.  Our planes were lined up wingtip to wingtip and that just made them easy targets.  And we missed some warning signs of the attack.  The Japanese sent submarines as part of the attack and we actually sunk one of them before the planes came, but apparently we didn't think too much of it.  Radar picked up the Japanese planes, but the military was expecting US planes to arrive from the mainland that morning so that's what they thought was showing up on the radar.  I didn't really know much about the USS Arizona.  Over 2,000 Americans died on December 7, 1941 and almost half of them were on the USS Arizona.  The ship sunk and approximately 900 members of the Navy are still entombed on the ship today.  And the memorial is built right above the ship.  A few parts of the ship still stick out above the water.  And 75 years later, oil is still leaking out of the ship into Pearl Harbor.  It's about two quarts of oil per day.  You can see it and smell it when you're on the memorial.  The legend is that it will stop when the last surviving member of the Arizona dies, but I heard that there's still way to much oil in there for that to be true (I think there are six surviving members).  So it really is amazing to be on that memorial.  I said a prayer for peace while I was there and held back some tears.

Part of the USS Arizona that's above water

Yep, that's the oil still leaking into Pearl Harbor 75 years later.

A few other things I learned:  The attack was not just on Pearl Harbor.  It was really an attack on the whole island of Oahu.  There were several American airfields throughout the island that were attacked (of course, most of the damage was done at Pearl Harbor).  World War II showed that battleships were pretty much obsolete.  The aircraft carrier was the wave of the future (of course, that's where the Japanese planes came from).  The US was fortunate that three aircraft carriers were out at sea delivering planes places rather than at Pearl Harbor on December 7.  And I think it was 21 ships that were sunk or damaged by the Japanese and all but three were recovered and put back into use.  I'll be spending a lot more time on Pearl Harbor with my eighth graders this year.

There are two museums that you can go into for free right by where you see the movie.  They're not too big, but there's good information on the road to war and the attack in them.  I probably spent about a half hour in each.  Then there's the USS Bowfin submarine and museum.  I'm fairly confident that it was the first time I was on a submarine.  The museum had a thing about how the submarines were named for fish and they had these cartoonish logos.  It reminded me of Abraham Simpson and the Flying Hellfish (they weren't on a submarine, but the logo looked like these submarine logos).

The last thing I did at Pearl Harbor was take a bus to nearby Ford Island. The battleships were all lined up along Ford Island.  And there are two museums to see there.  One is the USS Missouri, which is where the Japanese formally surrendered to the Allies on September 2, 1945.  That was in Tokyo Bay, but today the site of the end of the war is at the site of the beginning of US involvement.  So you can take a tour of the ship.  It reminded me of the USS Midway, which I saw in San Diego four years ago.  The Missouri is a little older.  And I'm going to go ahead and disagree with Harry Truman on something (and I do respect Truman more than most 20th century presidents).  Truman wanted the surrender signed on the Missouri since he was from Missouri.  Other people wanted it to be on a ship that was at Pearl Harbor, which would have been more appropriate.  The Missouri was being built in Brooklyn at the beginning of the war so it was not at Pearl Harbor.  And the other thing to see on Ford Island was the Pacific Aviation Museum.  It's a museum in two hangars that have been around for a long time.  In one of them you can still see bullet holes from the Japanese attack.  They have some old planes that you can check out in there.  So that was Pearl Harbor.  It's probably right behind Gettysburg in terms of American war sites to see, just because there's even more to see at Gettysburg

That's the USS Missouri on the left and the USS Arizona Memorial on the right, where the war officially ended and where US involvement started.

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This is a view of the Arizona Memorial from the Mississippi.

After that, I went to Helena's Hawaiian Food, which was on Man vs. Food.  I had the same things Adam had, laulau and pipikuala ribs.  The laulau was unlike anything I've ever had.  It's butterfish and pork wrapped in some kind of Hawaiian leaves.  It was good, but I liked the pipikuala ribs better.  Of course I've had ribs before, but there was definitely something different about them.  Very good stuff.  I went back to my hotel to charge my phone for a bit and then I had planned on going to the Brewseum.  The Brewseum sounds right up my alley, a brewery combined with a museum (all that's missing is sports).  But at that point I was tired and all museumed out, I highly doubt that the museum was going to be better than the ones I had already seen, and it was over a mile from my hotel.  So I decided to just have a beer at the hotel and relax.

This was good and surprisingly cheap.

On my last morning in Hawaii, I still had a couple of things to do.  First I wanted to get to another Man vs. Food spot, Mac 24/7.  It's open 24 hours and it's really popular.  I got there around 6:00 in the morning and there wasn't much of a crowd.  I had a short stack of their blueberry pancakes (Adam was there for the challenge and had a gigantic version of what I had).  There should be a short stack of the short stack.  I ate a little more than half and couldn't do any more than that.  They were very good, but I felt bad wasting that much food.  I can't be the only one that can't get all the way through their pancakes.  Why not have three options:  a real short stack, what I got (call that the regular version), and the crazy gigantic challenge option?  After that, I went to mass at Sts. Peter and Paul.  It was a Wednesday morning so I didn't have to go to church, but there was nothing else that I would want to do that I would have time for and it's another place where I can say I went to mass (by the time you're reading this, I will have been to mass in five different countries and many states).  My Uber driver to the church was somebody who came to the United States at a young age from Thailand (I hope I'm remembering that correctly).  He said he grew up as a Buddhist, but went to Catholic school when he came to the United States.  Despite that, he still had no interest in believing in God.  His wife is Catholic and he converted because of her.  He said that when he first converted, he was just doing it to keep his wife happy, but since then he's had experiences that made him a devout believer.  He was a really interesting guy and it was pretty cool that he happened to be my Uber driver when I was going to mass.

They were showing a replay of the Dodger game from the night before while I ate this.  The Dodgers beat the Giants 9-5.  Good times.

So that was my trip to Hawaii.  I definitely wouldn't be opposed to going back someday.  I only saw a very small part of the state.  Some parts that I saw were beautiful and some not so much (like by the airport).  I'm sure the other islands are very different since they don't have cities like Honolulu.  So maybe I'll be back and see more of the state someday, but for now it's crossed off the list.  Only two states to go.