So I left home at seven in the morning on.. uh.. Sunday it was. Uneventfully went through security.. no full body scanners as threatened. My flight left at 1010ish as scheduled.. landed in Phoenix around 210 as scheduled.. I enjoyed a nice lunch of a California Pizza Kitchen tuna sandwich, and the cashier was awed by the fact that I said my please and thank you's. Why people can't take the three seconds to be gracious is beyond me...
Okay, not so beyond me because I've definitely been a bitch before but. You know.
Departed Phoenix on time around 3pm, but not after I snapped a few shots of the red desert mountains. Being an East coast gal... terrain isn't something typically in my visual vocabulary. Yet, all I could think of as we rolled past giant cacti on the tarmac was Jim Morrison rolling around in the sand eating peyote buttons. Totally not stuck in the 60s...
However, as we faced 100kt headwinds, I landed in Honolulu an hour behind schedule.. at 730 pm. Oh all these times were local mind you. So.. to do the math.. I left home at 7am eastern time, landed in Hawai'i at 730 Hawai'i time...
Oh wait I haven't even arrived at the hotel yet.
Yeah so I take the shuttle to Thrifty where they ask me what color car I want.. I forget my options but one of the four was white and another was orange and... I doubt I even have to tell you which one I picked. It's a Dodge Caliber. And the seat goes high enough that I can see over the steering wheel.
SO. So I deny the $12 a day GPS because even though NOAA tried to screw me over I don't feel like charging them more than I have to. Here I am thinking that I can navigate an unfamiliar land with just the scribbled Google Maps directions in my notebook. Ha! Ha! Ha! After 45 mins in excess of the time it should have taken and missing turns countless times... I finally settled into my hotel room at 10pm. So... 18 hours of travel. AWESOME. Not. I promptly passed the fuck out.
This morning I took a trip to the ABC store, which is not a liquor store like it is on the East coast (though I did buy my wine there), because I didn't have a toothbrush and the hotel didn't provide conditioner or lotion. I also am staying in an efficiency with a mini-stove and mircowave and toaster so I figured I'd buy some food while I'm there and stock up. It's kind of awkward going to restaurants by yourself.
One two skip a few and I'm on my way to NOAA. Met with my mentor. Pretty uneventful.. just talked about my project. He and the other Ecosystems & Oceanography staff are pretty chill. They had a Christmas (Holiday?) party this past Friday and the tradition is to have a leftovers lunch on the following Monday and I gladly joined in the feast. They all suggested places I should visit, and one of the girls who's working on her Ph. D. offered to take me surfing on Wednesday if the weather was nice.
Oh yeah the weather. Sucks balls. Rainy and overcast. Laaaame.
So after my NOAA trip I decided to visit Pearl Harbor. I also decided to turn on the navigation software on my phone. BEST DECISION EVER.
Besides the fact that a 40-something park ranger kept trying to flirt with me (though he had a definite twinkle in his eye so.. I was kind of confused.. maybe he just liked my hair), it was kind of uneventful too. The tickets to see the Arizona were all handed out and it was at least ten bucks to tour the battleship (?) in the harbor as well as the submarine and... been there done that whatever. So I just kind of wandered. I really didn't have much desire to go in the first place but it was something to do. I'm down for honoring fallen soldiers and all that jazz but I get sick every time the US tries to romanticize war. Watching kids play with periscopes pretending they're torpedoing ships... it might be all innocent fun but... it's really a shocking sign of how war has been pushed on us as some glorious event. It's really not. It's usually a bunch of bullshit. But I digress.
One two skip a few and I'm back at the hotel. Have me a snack and then I went for a nice run down at this beach-side park. Well, jog. I can't run. It doesn't work. But I did three miles in.. 40 minutes? With a bathroom stop. I ran on the sand too for as much as was there. Yaaay endorphins.
So, the plan for tonight is to head over to Arnold's which is some dive/tiki bar with good music and (according to Yelp) home to good looking "stoner/surfer" bartenders. Sounds like my kinda crowd. Walking-distance too from my hotel, of course. I didn't buy insurance on the rental car, so there will be no driving for me no matter how many drinks I have (cue my mother high-fiving... someone.. and saying "that's my girl!")
I don't know what I'm doing tomorrow. I know I want to go to Diamond Head, which is the leftover crater from the volcano that formed Oahu, and spend a day at the North Shore... but I'd like to pick the day with the best weather.. which I don't know yet. I want to go see the Valley of the Temples too, which has some sweet Buddhist temple I hear. Other than that? Who knows. Apparently there's a road that pretty much hugs the coast and I can take a 2-3 hour scenic drive... maybe I'll do that too while I have a car. I hate tourist traps and I have no desire to fall into or anywhere near them. If it's nice out maybe I'll hike a waterfall or something but the recent rains have made everything muddy so.. that wasn't recommended at all. Diamond Head is okay because it's a paved path but pretty much any other outdoor adventures are going to be dangerously slippery.
Alright well, shower time, and time to get my tiki on!
Mahalo!
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