Day 7 LA to Hawaii Cruise

Day 7 Tuesday January 22,2013
Honolulu, Hawaii
High 77 low 69 F
Sunrise 7:11 Sunset 6:15
________________________________________
The morning started with a waram start. The sun was bright but he wind was there to cool you off.

About 10 o'clock we cleaned up the cabin and realized we needed a nap at nap around noon. We put it together and got the manual wheel chair ready to go. When we got down to the port terminal the Hilo Hatties van was ready to transport us to the store. We had a great shop including a new pearl pennet and earings that matched for Sue. I got two new Hilo Hatties shirts. The Honoulu Hilo Hattie's is know for its exclusive Elvis Presley collection. In the lobby going in, there is a gigantic red shirt of the same fabric design as the red Elvis Presley one.  People stop and take photo of their loved ones in from of the world's largest Hawaiian shirt. 

Talking with our return driver from Hilo Hattie's, she mentioned how cold it was the week before we arrived. It was so cold that no one wanted to get out of bed. They just tried to stay warm under their covers. Not now.. the temperature was hovering around 80 degrees. The curise before ours had a very rough trip probably due to the weather front that made the island so cold.

When we got out of the store and were waiting for the shuttle back to the ship, I looked at our four bags we brought in and thought for sure that we had left the backpack in the store. I backtracked through the store and their lost and found with no luck.  Finally I went back out to where the bus would pick us up. Sue had "found" the backpack hung on the handles of the manual wheelchair. The driver had collapsed the wheelchair and so some very nice people got up out of the front seats of the bus so that sue would not have to walk the length of the bus to find a seat.  In the mean time the people just kept loading on to the bus. It looked like there was over 100 people and their Hilo Hattie treasures that climbed on board.

Sue had had enough of the heat and the crowds. When we got back to the ship, I was dispatched to do room service at the Lido buffet.

Our current docking in Honolulu is 1/2 mile from where we docked the last year at the Aloha Tower shopping center. When we came in this morning a large fuel tanker pulled up beside is to download some more fuel. I think that was the reason for the change of location.  It allowed us to be closer to Waikiki (still at least 3 miles away) and closer to the China town portion of Honolulu. The Chinatown section was basically just on the other side of the freeway.

I remembered that there was a music shop selling instruments at the end of the Aloha Tower Mall adjacent to the docking site last year.

I was on a quest to get a nicer ukulele. When I walked back to this shopping mall I expected to see that store. It was not there. I asked a stall owner about where it might have moved and all she said was the music store owner had died.

I decided to ask a taxi driver where I could get one.  He was a young Asian driver wearing a suit and a spiky hair cut.  He said sure.. he got on his cell phone and asked a couple of his friends and they came up with the location of a uke shop.  The answer was a shop in the Marriott Hotel compound on Waikiki. It took $19.50 to get here because of the traffic... it was 4pm and like many big cities, the rush hour was on.  When we got there he jumped out of the car and ran into the Marriott Hotel ground floor to look for the store. The Marriott had a small grouping of stores on its ground floor.  One was even under construction as it look out on the main street.... one way of course. He ran back to tell me that it was there.  So I tipped him and headed in.

His directions to me were, "Its right beside the ABC store."

When I got there, the store was closed. There was a sign on the door that said that it would reopen at 5:00pm. I walked out across the street and used my Starbucks card. At 5:05 I walked into the store and it was open... yeah! The name of the store is "Bob's Ukulele"

An older brown skinned man was manning the store. It is hard to know what the protocol is for shopping in a ukelele store could be.  The lessons on the ship said that the only way to know what the instruments sound like is to play them. The store had about 10 to try in my range.. up to $225. There was one at 145 that had a very nice sound even to my inexperienced ear. I bought it and the store clerk pulled it out the cardboard box and tunned it and asked if I wanted a case for it for 25 dollars.. yes.

I left along the beach and looked for a bus going back. I realized that the busses were going the wrong way and the whole street was a one way street headed for Diamond Head.

I walked up toward the mountain and a couple of blocks North the street was one direction going the other way.

I was glad that I had bought the soft case for the uke. It made moving it around the streets of Honolulu so much easier.

I could not believe the number of stores along the streets of Waikiki. There were huge crowds of people too. Everyone seemed pretty mellow in their swim suits.


I found a group of people waiting to get on the bus too.  About half of them had the classic free bag that Princess gives to each cabin.  The looked like people from small towns in Iowa... and indeed they were. The big city was a bit puzzling for them.  After a couple of buses passed in from of them that were totally loaded to the gills with commuters they looked a little desperate.  One told them not to get on because it was too loaded.

An enterprising van driver with an independent excursion van to airport shuttle service type approached the group. He offered to take the whole group including me for 4 dollars a piece, right to the ship. That was too much for the Iowa Nebraska farmers of the group.  Plus it was a little risky because he wasn't a regularly scheduled entity.  The bus charged $2.50.  Finally the van driver offered to do it for 3 dollars apiece. I gave the driver a $5 dollar bill when I got out and thought it was a good deal.

Another great day in paradise.