May 6, 2012 - Day 8 Disney Wonder IN Oahu

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Here are today's scanned Personal Navigator and Shopping Map as well as the next week's TV and Movie schedules.

It was hot and sunny when we woke up as Wonder was approaching Honolulu and it stayed that way. We had breakfast outside BBB and we were off the ship shortly after 7:30am. We caught a Thrifty shuttle without hassle pretty quickly and learned we are docked at Pier 2. Pier 2 looks to be about 1 mile away from Piers 4 to 11 which are at the Aloha Tower complex. Too bad! Clay was right we did dock on the starboard side once in Hawaii, here in Honolulu. Aloha Tower was visible in the distance from the port side.

We were in our car at the airport by 8:06am. We had some trouble finding our way to The Valor in the Pacific, Pearl Harbor National Park. Signage was confusing and I don't trust Clay's GPS but, it did get us there once I stopped interfering and I have apologized! But, we were there with one bag checked for $3 per piece and at the will call for tickets by just after 8:30am for our 10:30am timed entry. For a fee, you can now reserve a free timed ticket to the USS Arizona. Since we had heard horror stories of people coming in on cruise ships getting to the park to find that it would be hours before they could visit or worse all the tickets for the day had been handed out already, Clay didn't want to take a chance and so we had reserved tickets at the will call desk. The security there is such that you can't carry anything in but a camera and water in a clear bottle. We didn't want to take a chance on the rental car being broken into, hence the bag check. The email we had printed out and brought with us to get our reserved tickets said you had to pick them up at least one hour before your scheduled time, so we were only 1 hour early.

The man who checked us in said he had 10am tickets available if we'd like and we exchanged for those. We each rented a $7.50 audio guide. Then we walked around everything related to USS Arizona except the film and boat ride out to the monument and wreckage. I was nodding during the 23-minute film! I got a little sea sick as we docked at the Arizona memorial and being in it didn't make me any better, nor knowing I had to get back on the boat to return. I should just say that I didn't want to come to Pearl Harbor and I'm not glad I did it. Clay seems pleased enough with the day, but it was wasted on me. It isn't that I don't honor our veterans or war dead, my father and grandfather were war veterans. I do. I just really don't like spending my vacation time at disturbing war locations. Clay has late in life developed an interest in battlefields. What is up with that? I haven't put up too much of a stink when he wanted to visit Revolutionary War or Civil War battlefields because let's face it, they are just woods and fields now. When we traveled in Europe, he never expressed an interest and that was good because I don't want to visit any thing recent. I was disturbed enough by the Anne Frank House and DC's Holocaust Museum. I honor the losses and the suffering, but I don't want to visit it on my vacation. It is disturbing and well it should be and that seems incongruous combined with a fun vacation. I guess it is just me. I love visiting cemeteries but that is about monumental art and landscaping to me, whereas war sites are trauma and violence and gruesome suffering to me. Well, I can't explain it and I feel bad about it. Since Clay has developed this yen, I guess I'll have to get over it or we'll have to figure out something that we can both live with.

When we got back ashore, we got into the short Attack Film we had missed earlier, used the rest rooms and then I had to go to the snack bar. I got some peanuts that were kind of like Chinese Boston baked beans and a Coke. Clay got a Klondike Bar. We sat in the shade and ate, then we went to the Gift Shop. I got a metal Tree of Life sculpture bookmark with a red tassel for a Christmas Tree ornament for $8.95.

Then we got in line and bought tickets to visit the Bowfin submarine and museum with audio guides for $10 for me and $7 for Clay as a senior. I had heard people at the Arizona Memorial talking about how they were glad they spent the money on the Bowfin and neither of us could remember being on a submarine for years. It was OK. There were volunteer guides on the sub that kept pushing us and others out of the audioguide's space and bunching us up in uncomfortable clusters for no apparent reason. There weren't that many people visiting since it wasn't free, like the Arizona site. So, we didn't get to listen to any part of the audioguide all the way through, we had to keep skipping to the next number. So, it wasn't as nice as it should have been. No idea what that was about because they weren't at all busy in the noon time heat!

Clay wanted shave ice and I wanted lunch first. We had no idea where to go eat today. Clay used some phone app to come up with a list. We picked one and followed the GPS to it. It looked like an authentic plate lunch place, but it was closed on Sunday. Next door was Dixie Grill with a full parking lot with Harleys, the police and an adjoining tattoo parlor. So we went there. Big mistake. We wasted a meal ashore at a place that smoked their own meat and styled themselves as a Deep South Redneck bar and grill, I guess. I had a turkey, bacon, melted pepper jack cheese sandwich with fries that was OK and filling for $10 or so. Clay had fish and chips. He ate the fish, but not many fries. He didn't say how it was. I felt a bit better after lunch and told Clay I wanted to go to the Dole Plantation and showed him on the Drive Guide Map. It was only about 2pm. He said OK, but he had a shave ice place called Waiola's in his GPS first.

We drove for over an hour to the far side of Waikiki to get there. I think it was 23 miles away from where we started and the opposite direction of the Dole Plantation. Clay boasted that Obama ate there. It put us both in a mind of Plum Street SnoBall in New Orleans, except not in a Garden District setting, more like in the midst of apartment building blocks. We drove by and then circled, looking for a parking spot. We parked a block away and around the corner and walked back and stood in line (clearly it was popular!). We sat in the shade on the side of the building and ate them. The locals were getting theirs with macadamia nut ice cream in the bottom and beans on top. (We had the beans version once in Singapore and that was enough for us, though I kind of liked it. Of course, it didn't help that we got durian flavor!)  Clay said it was the best shave ice he ever had. I would rank it below Ululani's and even with Plum Street and Hills of Snow. I forget what flavors we ordered, though I know I ordered vanilla and strawberry and the vanilla was blue again. I think Clay ordered tropical fruit flavors again. I know they had posted up Obama's 3 flavors and Clay did NOT order that. I didn't write it down and now I don't remember. We walked back to the car.

Now Clay was ready to go to the Dole Plantation and mystified when I again showed him a map and explained the concept of going to things in order so they come together. At Pearl Harbor, we were half way to Dole Plantation but now we are a lot farther away and can't go. We finally fought through Waikiki traffic past the Ala Moana Mall and got into downtown Honolulu to see the outside of Iolani Palace (closed Sundays) and the King Kamehameha Statue. Then, we drove toward the airport, found a gas station and filled our Chevy Aveo with 2 gallons of gas at $4.439/gallon and turned the car back into Thrifty for $36.80 at 4:15pm which was 2 hours early. But, Honolulu is a hard place to drive around and we were both done! We got back on the ship in time to shower before dinner in Triton's.

Tonight's menu was Makahiki, which was something about a fall festival. Clay had conch fritters and flank steak. I had iceberg lettuce and Polynesian chicken sausages with cheese grits and zucchini. They were really stretching to make anything we ate have anything to do with fall in Polynesia. I mean was that a joke, Polynesian chicken sausages? You know because of all the feral chickens! Anyway, with all aboard at 10:30pm again, dinner was sparsely attended. They very proudly brought out my bowl of raspberries, which was perfect timing because none of the desserts sounded appetizing to me. Clay got the upside down pineapple pudding with rum sauce that he ate but said was too heavy on the rum sauce. I ate all my raspberries and didn't share. They offered me another bowl tomorrow night, but I declined so I could wait and see what is on the menu.

We have no plan for tomorrow. Does not bode well. Clay said he would research it and make a plan, but he is sleeping. We plan to go to the Keiki Hula Show at 8:30pm in WDT. I'll wake him up then and see if he still wants to go. I don't really understand why he refused to buy Internet onboard. We'll probably have to figure out what to do with all the leftover shipboard credit after they take the tips out of it.

The Keiki Hula Show was really well done. Keiki is Hawaiian for kids. The girls usually start hula lessons at age 3 and boys at age 7. They did a great show and it was a sweet farewell to Hawaii.

Health followup: I only had a fever for about 24 hours. I only lost my voice for about 24 hours too. Clay got a little less sick than me a few days later and he said he never had a fever. We both just had terrible coughs though for a few weeks. I was still yakking up a loogie or 2 a day up until last week. It was a mucus overload for both of us and not much else. We are both over it now and have no idea if we caught something, or if we were allergic to something or what. So, I guess once the initial bad part was over I forgot about writing updates on it and I didn't want to leave the impression that we were sick for the entire cruise! Sorry about that!

Thrifty Rental Car recap: All in all, we were quite satisfied. There were some times when they could have done a better job with the shuttles to the airport in the morning crush, but we were still satisfied. If you had had a tightly scheduled day and it had been important to you to get exactly the car you had reserved, then you might have been very unhappy. We were just hanging loose and didn't care, so we were fine with our experience. I want to say that I got almost all of my information about Thrifty car rentals from a cruise on Cruise Critic's Hawaii Ports of Call message board. The best suggestions made repeatedly over there are to join Thrifty's Blue Chip program which is free and will streamline the pickup process as well as put you in a shorter line. The other best suggestion was to rent through Discount Hawaii Cars which gave a discount code for each rental, other than that it was exactly as if we had rented directly through the Thrifty website. Also, as I recall, when I reserved each car rental, I clicked through Discount Hawaii Cars website as pier pickup for cruise ship passengers and I believe it automatically set it to let Thrifty know we would be expecting a pier pickup. I still called on arrival at most of the ports just to make sure as it didn't always look like a sure thing. So, I can recommend Discount Hawaii Cars, Thrifty's Blue Chip and Thrifty as well as Cruise Critic's Hawaii board.


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