Hawaii, Day 2

We started our vacation on Oahu pretty much because Brent had never seen the Arizona memorial.  Because of the way we planned, or rather didn’t plan, we ended up needing to take an all-day bus tour to go.  That meant getting up early (again!) to meet up with our babysitter of the day, Chelsea, and her bus full of other hardy souls at 6:00 a.m.

Here is the memorial from the land.

 We spent some time in the small but well-executed interpretive museum about the lead-up to the bombing of Pearl Harbor.  All the soldiers on both sides were so young.  Then we took the ferry out to the memorial itself.

It is a serene and beautiful place, solemn, and yet somehow hopeful.  The fuel leaking slowly from the ship adds a rainbow sheen to the water in places.  Leis adorn the area in front of the list of those lost.  The ship itself, or its bones anyway, sleeps underneath it all.

Having toured a submarine before, I didn’t really feel the need to explore the Bowfin.  I like boats that stay on top of the water.  Also:  too squishy inside.  Brent wasn’t excited about cramming himself through the small doorways either, so we visited the exhibit about the actual day of the bombing instead.

From there, we hopped on a shuttle to the USS Missouri.  I like that it has its own medal ribbons. 

The Japanese surrender was signed on the Missouri.

This is a copy of the surrender, but General MacArthur’s actual pen.

By the time we made it to the aviation museum, I was pretty museum-ed out in spite of an excellent loco moco plate lunch, but here is a tractor that helped prevent enemy planes from landing on Niihau by creating furrows everywhere.  (There was an incident in which one plane did land and I saw the remains of it, too, but the tractor was cuter.)

The planes I like best have fun pictures on them, like this mongoose: 

After that, our tour group drove through the cemetery at Punchbowl, where Ernie Pyle, Daniel Inouye, and many others are buried.  On the way back “home,” we drove by many of the historic sites of Honolulu, including the Iolani Palace and the statue of King Kamehameha I.

Then we crashed for a while because we’d been out running around for eleven hours.

Tomorrow:  sleep in!