Hawaii Day Four - Diamond Head, the Royal Palace and other scenes of Oahu

Although we’re on vacation, you wouldn’t have known it by the many days we actually got up early to ‘beat the rush’ to an attraction. Today was no different. Today we decided to head to Diamond Head to take what we’ve been told ‘spectacular pictures’ of Waikiki and Oahu. So we met downstairs at 6:45 a.m. (are we nuts or what?), grabbed a bit to eat at Seattle’s coffee and then headed to the parking garage for our ‘scooby mobile’.

Now as you already read in this post, the Scooby mobile is fun to drive, the hard part for us ‘older folks’ is getting in and out of it! But we managed….

From where we were located, it took maybe 30 minutes to get to Diamond Head. Now no one told us (at least me) of how many tunnels you have to go through on Oahu. And as many of my friends know, I in particular do not like tunnels…..at all! Getting to Diamond Head was no exception. Thank goodness it was a short tunnel.

After extracting ourselves from the dune buggy, we start on our journey to reach our goal….to get to the top of Diamond Head…… After some huffing and puffing, and a few rest stops along the way, we made it to the very top of Diamond Head! This was no small feat. There are 99 steps, a tunnel (did I mention how much I like tunnels?) and a very small, claustrophobic opening to squeeze through to get to the very top, but we all did it! The view from the very small ‘postage stamp’ area is every bit spectacular as we were told! Just look at some of these pixs!




















After we made it back down, we decided to head off to center city to see the Iolani Royal Palace and the government buildings. While in the dune buggy, I took some scenes of Oahu. And why not take advantage of having no windows (except a windshield) and no roof top.

Here are some scenes of Iolani Palace (we did not tour the inside), the Government buildings (only opened weekdays) and scenes of Oahu….

It started to sprinkle while driving in our Scooby mobile. If you hadn’t noticed in the pictures of the dune buggy, our windshield wipers are, um, a little shorter than ‘normal’. We had a good chuckle and were very glad that the shower didn’t last long….






When we got back to the hotel, we were hungry! (big surprise) Not wanting anything too expensive (not easy to do here), we decided to wander around the "International Marketplace" across from our hotel. There we found "Coconut Willie's", a fun little place up in the trees. Here's a picture of our community of tropical drinks.




So, then what do you do when you have only one evening left in Waikiki? You cram in a walk on the beach, watch the sunset, eat, and drink (which we’re very good at). We walked from the beach side of our hotel westward to a jetty that everyone seems to climb on top of to watch the sunset. We were no different. There’s no words to describe what we saw, so here are some pictures.

After that, we walked to the “Top of Waikiki”, a revolving restaurant on top of one of the hotels. During our dinner, we think we made 1-1/2 revolutions, seeing the scene outside our window changing constantly. We ended that part of our evening with some 20 year tawny Port wine, something Dave’s been looking to enjoy ever since the trip started.

Then, we walked to the Halekulani Hotel, where our friends from Hawaii Food Tours told us there was a jazz club that served coconut cake, with rasberry sauce, that was to die for. And boy were they right! We never had anything like it before. We listened to the music, ate cake, and drank coffee until we were ready to head back to our hotel for one last night on Oahu.

Unfortunately, our airport transfer would arrive all too early … at 5:45 AM! (early mornings and vacation…..eh?)