Oahu: So much more than just Waikiki.

Last updated on February 4, 2022

We had not originally intended to visit Oahu, but with the itinerary change, scheduling PCR Covid tests, coordinating the Egypt tour dates and KVB’s recommendations for the least painful flights across the globe…here we are! Oahu is the most populous island in Hawaii and known for Waikiki, Pearl Harbor and Honolulu, the capital of the state. Honolulu very much has the feel of a mainland American city, but you are never more than 15-30 minutes from a beach. The city plus the metropolitan area around it has over 800,000 people.

We had a few hours before our Walgreen’s appointments and condo check in so we wasted some time unsuccessfully looking for new Keens for Sy who has apparently outgrown his in 2 months. People here only seem to wear flip flops. We ended up getting him cheapy water shoes from the grocery store. We also went to Leonard’s Bakery for malasadas because you just really have to. Unfortunately, we got someone else’s order and didn’t realize until we were too far away so we missed out on the featured flavor…Strawberry. Turns out haupia (coconut) isn’t that bad. Leonard’s is a must see if you ever make it to Oahu.

We checked into the condo in the Ilikai Hotel, the first luxury high rise hotel in Hawaii when it opened in 1964. It had a nice view of the pool, the beach, the harbor and the Duke Kahanamoku Lagoon. It also has AC and no bugs! Whoop.

We went to Walgreens for our Covid PCR tests. 4/5 went well, but I got flustered when the woman at the drive through window said I didn’t do Griffin’s correctly. She thought I just stuck it in his nose and pulled it out. I told her I went around and around the requisite number of times. Then for some reason I thought it would be good to re-swab his nose to appease her so I tried to get the swab out of the tube and spilled most of the liquid out on to my lap. I asked for another swab and tube. She said she didn’t have any additional supplies and that it would not matter for the test accuracy. She submitted the sample “as is”. Trey and I didn’t believe her so I scrambled and immediately scheduled another appointment for Griffin the following morning (last spot available!) at 9 am at a different Walgreens. Recall that we were already stressed about exactly WHEN the tests needed to be done to get the results before we departed on Saturday at 730 am, but not too far out to nullify Egypt’s requirements. So this added more stress!

We put the Walgreens drama behind us and spent a fantastic day in Haleiwa on the North Shore. We had such a great time that went a second time later in the week. The North Shore used to be known just for surfing and for Matsumoto Shave Ice (more on shave ice later), but it has developed a lot over the past 10 years while keeping its small town charm. There are many more food options and little shops that have popped up. There is an incredible food truck court and people walking around the town. We had açaí bowls at Tropical Tribe and learned a few lessons to take home…1) always go heavy on the cocoa nibs, but temper them with lots of honey, 2) when the acai-molier says try the Brazilian style açaí, do it and 3) peanut butter makes everything better. Some additional highlights are the Paalaa Kai Bakery and Matsumoto’s. Paalaa Kai is a Portuguese bakery known for its snow puffies, a combination of a turnover and a Boston creme donut. This is a very bare-bones establishment with a Soup Nazi-like vibe…take a number, stand in line, shuffle down the line, only enter store when another person leaves, and quickly give your order. I think it may just be because English is not their first language. Regardless, everything was excellent and Trey even bought jello from the place because it looked so good.

Matsumoto Shave Ice is a Haleiwa institution. They have been making shave ice here since 1956. Shave ice is an ice-based dessert made by shaving a block of ice and flavoring it with syrup and other sweet ingredients. It is so NOT a snow cone which is made with crushed ice rather than shaved ice and may be the most overrated of the ice-based desserts. The thin ice shavings of shave ice allow for the flavored syrups to be absorbed completely instead of sinking to the bottom. Additional ingredients that lie underneath the ice flakes are often called “unders” and must be added to the cup, cone, or bowl before shaving the ice on top. Traditional “unders” include sweetened red azuki beans, fresh fruits, and ice cream. Hawaiian shave ice is also often accompanied by toppings such as mochi balls, li hing mui (salty dried Chinese plums) powder and sweetened condensed milk (I know. This all seems like a bit much, but trust me go for all of it). Matsumoto’s is a must see if you come to Oahu. They are very reasonably priced. The merch store is top notch and the workers are incredibly friendly.

*Note the kids doing the Shaka sign above. The shaka sign, sometimes known as “hang loose“, is a gesture of friendly intent often associated with Hawaii and surf culture. It consists of extending the thumb and smallest finger while holding the three middle fingers curled, and gesturing in salutation while presenting the front or back of the hand; the hand may be rotated back and forth for emphasis.

The North Shore is known for its huge waves in the winter. In fact, there are numerous surfing competitions here throughout the winter in places like Banzai Pipeline, Sunset Beach, and Alligator Rock. We ended up going to Waimea Bay Beach which is one of the better beaches that we have ever been to. It has some big waves as well, and we were initially intimidated to enter the water by all of the signs and lifeguards telling us to enter at our own risk, but the waves were fantastic (big, but fantastic). The breaks were easily 15 feet and can get pretty scary if you don’t know what you are doing. This beach is know for its rock jumping area, but we were told to only do it in the summer. That being said there were dozens of people jumping our second day here because the surf was much more calm. Ehhh…a reason to come back.

Trey actually found a place to play some ultimate in Hawaii. He met up with an old friend from Philadelphia, Eric Lu. Eric moved to Oahu just before the pandemic hit and invited him to come out and play in his weekly goaltimate game at Ala Moana regional park. It was just around the corner from our condo. We made it there on Wednesday and played soccer while Trey played. What a gorgeous setting with Honolulu on one side of the big grassy field and the ocean and sunset on the other side. The ultimate scene is such a small world. Trey played with Ryan and Ashley Morgan from his 2017 WCBU gold medal winning USA mixed masters team and apparently just missed seeing our old pal and Trey’s long term, winning co-captain Kimberly Beach who left Honolulu right before we arrived. It was great to run into some old friends and to make some new ones.

One of the most well known sites to see on Oahu is Pearl Harbor. Pear Harbor is a natural lagoon harbor in southern Oahu right next to Honolulu that became world news when it was attacked by the Empire of Japan on December 7, 1941 and directly led the United States entry into World War II. Today Pearl Harbor is the site of the Pearl Harbor National Memorial which includes the USS Arizona Memorial, the USS Bowfin museum, the USS Missouri museum and several others sites. We have been trying to get to Pearl Harbor for years, but could never get it together enough to buy the necessary pre-arrival tickets. What a mistake! This is a must do for anyone coming to Honolulu. Most people go to Pearl Harbor to see the USS Arizona Memorial and you do need to pre-book tickets for this as they do sell out. They withhold a portion of the tickets and release them for sale for the next day. You can also get lucky and wait stand-by to board the boat that takes you to the USS Arizona. The other sites at Pearl Harbor do not require pre-purchased tickets.

After arrival to the Pearl Harbor site we spent several hours walking around with a hand held audio guide. The ear phones were too big for Griffin, but the rest of us were very engaged by Jamie Lee Curtis narrating the audio text. Griffin was able to participate by holding the speaker to his ear. We took the small boat ride out to the USS Arizona to see the memorial. The memorial straddles the sunken hull of the battleship without touching it. There is an aura of something indescrible out there… peaceful, but sad and haunting. We saw the remains of the boat under the surface of the water with a small rainbow of oil floating nearby, glinting in the sun. A few quarts of oil leak from the boat each day, apparently not enough to cause environmental issues. It is not enough to warrant bringing up the entire ship and disturbing the rest of the dead. The oil sheen is sometimes referred to as “the tears of the Arizona” and represents the spirits of the over 1000 men who never made it out.

We learned a lot of history here. Some of the things we took home were:

• 1) 50 million people were killed in WWII. The numbers are staggering.
• 2) Roosevelt thought that moving our naval fleet to Hawaii would stop the Japanese from moving into any more islands in the Pacific, but the Japanese took that move as US aggression and escalated their response.
• 3) The Japanese thought that bombing Pearl Harbor and destroying our naval fleet there would demoralize the US and we would give up. The total opposite occurred and the US was then firmly in the war and determined to win.
• 4) The Japanese sent several mini submarines into Pearl Harbor as their back up plan in case the planes did not work, but none of them caused any damage as we sank them.
• 5) The US expected a land or sea attack and no one ever though that Japan could attack from the air because Japan is too far away from Hawaii for the planes to make it. Because of this, the US kept all their planes closely packed together on the airstrips to “protect” them from sabotage from the land. It unfortunately made it easier to bomb them from the air and most of the planes were destroyed before they could take off.
• 5) Radar back then was pretty crap, but the US did detect the Japanese planes coming towards Hawaii about 15 minutes before they arrived. Unfortunately, an inexperienced supervisor presumed it was some planes they were expecting coming in from California and ignored the warnings.
• 5) Japan is really far from Hawaii and they used carriers for their air attack. This was the first time aircraft carriers had ever been used. They had planes stacked one upon the other under the deck and used lifts to bring waves of them from inside the ship to the deck for take off. This ushered in the era of the aircraft carrier and ended the era of the battleship.
• 6) The above photo titled, “The date that will live in infamy”, shows Roosevelt’s speech in response to the bombing with the edits and changes that he made by hand.

The different exhibits are really well done and make an impact by presenting history with photos, quotes, personal stories and some hands-on displays like code breaking. There was a 20 minute video shown outside under a pavilion which was well worth it. I felt an overall sadness reading all the war time history and the human suffering. Why are there wars? Why are people so awful to each other? War, what is it good for? (Bonus if you know the reference).

We finished with a visit to the USS Bowfin museum. This is an actual submarine that was active during World War II that you can walk through. This was really interesting and everyone had a blast walking around and getting a feel for what life was like onboard a submarine. We all were impressed by the extremely close quarters that typical housed 80 men per patrol.

The USS Bowfin was first launched on the one year anniversary of the Pearl Harbor attack on December 9th, 1942. It completed nine successful war patrols with an average patrol length of 43 days. It sunk 44 enemy vessels. You can see them all listed in the photo above. Note the one French ship that was sunk. It was a Vichy France cargo ship. There was also a notable sinking of the Tsushima Maru, an unmarked Japanese cargo ship sunk carrying hundreds of schoolchildren in which about 1,484 civilians, including 767 schoolchildren, were killed; 59 children survived the sinking.

The Bowfin is basically a tube that is sixteen feet in diameter. Outside this tube, but inside the outer hull, there are tanks that fill with water to submerge the boat and flasks of compressed air that are used to blow out the water and bring the vessel to the surface. It carried 24 torpedoes that it could fire forward and aft, which increased its firepower and allowed it to fire at enemy vessels that were chasing her. It also carried 252 lead/acid batteries each weighing 1,500 pounds. While the submarine was submerged everything was powered by batteries because the diesel engines could not be used as they needed a constant supply of air. There were four General Motors 16-cylinder diesel engines connected to four General Electric generators used to run four motors and charge the batteries. While on the surface the sub could fight with three different naval guns.

On our last full day on Oahu went to the North Shore for a second time and took Eric’s recommendation to try Giovanni’s Shrimp Truck in Haleiwa. It is just one of several food trucks in this fantastic outdoor food court. I had the delicious shrimp scampi dish that they are famous for and tasted garlic for the next 24 hours. We even got the kids to try shrimp for the first time. There was ample outdoor seating and parking for $2.

So, the PCR saga continues. We got our Covid tests back on Thursday afternoon and 4/5 were negative. Griffin’s test was “unable to be completed”! We knew it! Seriously bad vibes were sent back to that Walgreen’s employee who told us it would be fine. We were so relieved that we had gone with our instincts and had a second test submitted for Griffin. We were hoping the second test would come back in a timely manner before our departure Sat AM. Fortunately, Labcorp came through and his second test results came back negative on Friday afternoon. Phew!

We packed up, tried and failed to go to bed early and were up by 430am to get to our flight to LA. We had a very stressful check in as American Airlines did not seem to have the most up to date requirements to enter Egypt in their “system” and insisted that our Covid tests were not timed correctly. In their system, it said the test results had to be 72 hours from the time of ARRIVAL in Egypt so the AA employee spent 15 minutes calculating the time difference and travel time, calling her manager and telling us our PCR test timing was wrong. We showed her the Egypt embassy website that clearly states that North American travelers can show PCR tests within 96 hours of DEPARTURE to Egypt. I finally said, “but we completed the VeriFly app and it says we are good to travel to Egypt” (Due to the uncertainty of the wording and requirements, we had proactively converted our vaccine cards and PCR tests to QR codes, and filled out all the paperwork the airlines sent us the prior week). OH! VeriFLY opened all the doors and all of a sudden she didn’t care that the test timing seemed wrong. Major sigh of relief and off we went. *Tip: Tell them immediately when you check in that you have VeriFLY!

Next up…fly halfway around the world in two days!!!