Aloha
Authored By Brian
It’s time to boogey. We caught a taxi off to SFO and boarded the plane for Oahu. We sat through a 5-hour gas attack as someone near by kept ripping nasty farts. Not exactly the welcome wagon I expected. Although our descent into Oahu was pretty cloudy, the glimpses of the island as we flew lower were really incredible. We arrived and were greeted with the traditional lei, took the shuttle to our upgraded Outrigger Reef hotel. We immediately had lunch at the Shorebird cafe and celebrated with the first pina colada of the week.
Jennifer took a nap while I thumbed through “Oahu Revealed” by Aloha Publications. Jennifer had picked out a nice list of things for us to do but we didn’t have an itinerary figured out of when to do what. By the time she woke up, we were ready to go for the week with a nice balance of sightseeing, physical activities and lounging.
We took off for dinner and ate at a recommended Thai restaurant called “Keoni by Keo’s” about 10 minutes from the hotel. We saw our waiter exactly three times while we ate the average tasting food. He offered us some “extra rice” that he was carrying from another table and then charged us for it!
Friday morning we went to the trip-sponsored free breakfast at THE WORLD’S MOST BEAUTIFUL CHINESE RESTAURANT. Like in most places, nothing is really free, and Honolulu must be where they coined that phrase. It turned into a 2-hour presentation with a light breakfast for all of the activities the tour group could sell us. We wanted to do a luau so we bought tickets through them to Germaine’s at a discount and then got out of there. On our way in we were directed to a Hawaii-ish looking backdrop to take a picture with a Hawaiian woman. As we left, another woman motioned for us to check out these photos. When we declined, she asked “you don’t want picture with diamond head in the background? Where you going to get one of those…” I thought to myself “uhh, outside the door of this restaurant?” where Diamondhead is visible?
I wasn’t feeling too well so I took some immodium AD and a nap and in the afternoon, Jennifer and I went down to the beach and took a surf lesson at the Hans Hedemann surf school. This was tons of fun! I think at least one of our early-twenties instructors was high as a kite but they were really good with us ‘big kids’ who were learning to surf. I got up on my second try and was cruising along the waves in no time flat. This was to be the beginning of my professional surf career. Then we returned to the beach and found someone had stolen my slippers (sandals in island-speak). I decided then and there to avoid eternal slipper stealage by not going pro. I mean, really, who steals shoes? Sandals especially? That’s gross.
