Hawaii - June 30

Happy birthday to J-Mav! I can't believe he is 8--and how cool to have his birthday in Hawaii!! So far, we haven't done much (went to Hilo Hatties), but tonight we are are going out to eat and this afternoon we are playing mini golf. J-Mav's request.

Yesterday we went to Pearl Harbor. What an amazing and awe-inspiring day. We got there around 10am and weren't going to be able to get out to the Arizona Memorial until 1:15pm, but then someone turned in their tickets for 10:45am, so the ranger gave them to us. Good thing I looked at them as we were walking away from the ticket counter because there were only five tickets and there were six of us. (Uncle Hooter was at work and Jenrie stayed home with Princess P.) I went back and asked if Spidey needed a ticket, and the guy just slyly took a blank one from the depths of his desk and wrote 10:45am in the blank spot. And poof! We had enough tickets for all of us.

We walked, rather quickly, through one part of the two-part museum, but then had to go get in line to board the boat out to the Arizona. We never did get back to the museum. I wish we had. What we saw was very interesting.
It's amazing how much oil is still coming up from the Arizona. On one side of the memorial, you could see the "oil rainbow" in the water; on the other side, you could actually see blobs of oil in the water... almost 70 years later!
We saw Gma G's uncle's name on the memorial wall. And the thing that amazed Hubby and I the most was the marble "box" set in front of the memorial wall. The ones with names engraved and dates much later than that day of infamy. Dates like 1986... 1991... 2010. These are apparently guys who wanted to be buried with their shipmates. Even all of those years later. I can only imagine the survivor's guilt these men must've lived with for their entire lives. That box was really more haunting than the wall with all of the names.
Then we went and toured the U.S.S. Bowfin submarine. It was put into service after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, and earned the nickname "Avenger." None of us could imagine being under water in it for weeks at a time.

We saw something other things, too. A suicide sub, some torpedoes, a rescue capsule. Then Uncle Hooter picked us up and drove Hubby, Keeper Boy, J-Mav and I over to the U.S.S. Missouri Battleship and took Gma G and Spidey home. We walked around the ship for several hours. It was very cool. No way I could find my way around it without the tour arrows! We got a kick out of the two copies of the surrender document that are encased on the surrender deck of the ship. On the Japanese copy, the Canadian representative signed on the wrong line so there is a lot of crossing out and writing in. Just looks weird on such an official document. We also got to see the U.S.S. Oklahoma Memorial, though we had to catch a shuttle back over to Pearl Harbor so we could check out the gift shop, so we didn't have too long to walk around and read all the names.
A very cool day.

We were supposed to have pictures last night, but we postponed it to Sunday.