Aloha! Bob and I arrived in Honolulu at @ 11 am Friday morning prior to our midnight departure from Auckland. Time traveling is better when you gain time! The weather forecast was for rain for our entire stay (late Friday morning through Monday night) due to a couple of tropical storms, but they have been good and died out except for some impact on surf.
Many moons ago when we planned to head to Hawaii after NZ, we thought we’d be in Hawaii longer and planned to see more of the islands. However, when a house sit in Germany opened up, we jumped at the chance, so have settled for an exploration of Waikiki with the short stay.
Our initial impression of Hawaii began before we even departed on our Hawaiian Islands flight from NZ when every pre-board announcement was followed by “mahalo.” This is Hawaiian for thank you, but they said it so often that we began to think it meant period, a verbal cue for us to understand they were done with their statement. It continued on board. It does beat getting sworn at.
Our next impression of Hawaii came at the airport where we could have watched a short feature film before our luggage arrived. Some poor girl traveling from overseas was frantically trying to find someone to talk to as she was going to miss her next flight. The Honolulu Airport is old and very small. We walked outside to get to Immigrations and after you pick up your luggage, you are almost immediately outdoors. The airport has been rated as one of the worst in the nation by the J.D. Power Annual North American Airport study. Of course, no one comes to Hawaii to visit the airport, and as we did get our luggage, no harm no foul.
We are not beach people, so our stay will tell you almost nothing as to whether you should visit (though I’m always of the opinion that it’s good to see and explore new places), but we have enjoyed our visit and the found the food to be much more affordable than we had expected.
We had to do a stroll near the beach beginning near the resorts before hitting the more public areas.
Many of the buildings in Waikiki seem older — built maybe in the 60s or 70s, but there are also some newer buildings, especially shopping centers for those needing to take a break from the beach.
If you’ve made it this far, mahalo.
Peckish Travels 