08- Lest We Forget

Lest We Forget

On Derek and Jackie's bucket list was a visit to the Arizona Memorial. I'm embarrassed to admit that all the times I'd been to Honolulu, I'd never made it to Pearl Harbour, so I'm grateful to Jackie and Derek for providing the opportunity. If you get there early, they give you free tickets, but seats are limited, so we had to make an early start.

Which we did.

All I can say is: well done, well worth your while, this is a must-do, indeed. The presentation in the theatre was balanced, dispelled a lot of misconceptions on what actually happened and set an appropriate stage of respect and thoughtfulness. The people in our group behaved accordingly: it would have been churlish not to.

It was a beautiful day, particularly for a 'winter' day:

From memory, Hawaii (I'm going to spell it without the glottal stop, only because it seems a bit pretentious to do so) is generally pretty wet this time of year: it's the rainy season. Well, it wasn't. Rainy, that is: it was cool, dry, beautiful.
The boat ride out to the memorial was lovely and cool. The water that the remains of the battleship was submerged in wasn't very deep... you could see the gun turrets and that was it:

Apparently the oil would keep seeping out of the submerged wreck for another fifty years, but that the environmental impact if they tried to extract the oil all at one go would be significantly worse.

The mood was quiet and respectful:

It was just that kind of morning.

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We returned to the digs for a thoughtful breakfast, then dropped by K-Mart to deliver a parcel for a dear family friend of Julia's workmate - Grant. He had made a lovely book of their times together in Hong-Kong: she was quite touched by this gift!

We had enough time, so we went up to Kaneohe, the northwest side of Oahu. It was my favourite weather: overcast:

Of course, the trip ended with a forage through the Kaneohe Sears and Macys and a rather heavy meal at Ruby Tuesdays.