Today is a day Baggage has been looking forward to since the beginning of the trip, Sims 3 is released. All the places we have gone to and all the things we have seen and she has been most looking forward to buying a computer game she could have got back in the UK.
To ensure we are somewhere we will be able to buy the game for her we have arranged a trip into Honolulu for today.
First stop the Ala Moana shopping Mall and Baggage gets her game, the only problem for her is that we are not hurrying back to the house, we are in fact likely to be out all day, so she will have to wait a while before she can play with it!
From Ala Moana we head for the Iolani Palace, the home of the Hawaiian monarchy up until the point that Hawaii was annexed by the USA and the final Monarch abdicated. This is also the only palace in the whole of the USA that ever housed a reigning monarch.
The tour around the palace is an audio guide based one and it is very informative and well worth doing, you get to look around all the above ground rooms of the palace and get a good insight into the life of the Hawaiian Monarchy. After the Monarchy was dissolved the palace was used as government offices and lucky to have survived, almost all of the royal possessions were auctioned off and spread around the world. Today the palace is a national monument and considered a treasure of the USA and a large effort has been made to recover those items previously sold off to bring the palace back to it’s original glory. How sentiment changes with time.
After the Iolani palace we head for the Aloha tower, which we climb for a view back across Honolulu, when it was originally built, at 10 storeys tall it was the highest building in Honolulu, in fact on any of the Hawaiian islands, today it is dwarfed, though it’s location on the waterfront is not crowded and it still offers great views back across the city.
Next stop Honolulu’s Hard Rock Cafe for lunch, I have a very good shrimp fajita, Lisa has salmon and Baggage spaghetti and a marinara sauce.
From here we head to Waikiki beach, it is now 5pm and when we get there we see the surf is very manageable. Lisa had wanted to give Baggage a surf lesson this trip but has not managed it, we do however manage to find a rental place from where we can get a surfboard for $10 an hour, and which is open until 7pm so they decide to give it a go. Baggage’s first surf is quite sucessfull, it is more a launching than a surfing with Lisa launching her into the wave, though she does manage to get to her knees. Lisa on the other hand completely fails to catch a wave when she takes the board out further, still at least she did have a play on a board off Waikiki beach.
After we have dried off and dressed we watch a bit of Hula that is being performed on the sea front, there is a Pan Pacific show happening around Waikiki this weekend
We eventually get back to the house just after 8pm, Baggage is straight onto her computer, but of course as with any new game it has to be loaded first and this one takes over half an hour to load, still it gives her chance to have a shower whilst it is loading. We let her stay up late to have a play on it, it would have been mean to declare it bed time after she had finished loading it after all, wouldn’t it!
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