Hawaii Vaca, Post 6 - Pearl Harbor: U.S.S. Missouri

So after our U.S.S. Arizona tour, we walk back to the bus, and more importantly, Cousin Dwight to head onto the actual Naval Base itself, for our lunch and a tour of the U.S.S. Missouri.

As I had said in the previous post, this is the ship where President Truman signed the treaty to end U.S. involvement in WWII however, that room/deck was closed off due to renovations while we were there, but it didn't mean the trip was a total loss either...  Hardly!

It was amazing listening to the stories about what this ol' girl could, and did, accomplish!  She was called the Mighty Mo for a reason (or two!).

The top portion of the ship is canvassed off during the restoration process, which I believe, Cousin Dwight told us would be done later this year.

Thems some big guns!!!  You almost lose the boys standing under the middle one.

The boys were pretty amazed at the size of the weapons.  Here was a weapon they could pose with and Caleb found it first.

Never to be outdone, Rob had to have a more dramatic, action-packed pose!

As far up as I could get, since they don't want people doing the Leonardo pose at the nose of the ship (I don't know ship terminology. I could look it up, but I'm not going too!).  Those chains are HUGE!!!  That's the U.S.S. Arizona memorial in the distance.   The white marker to the far right of the photo is the U.S.S. West Virginia, followed by the U.S.S. Tennessee, and closest the Arizona is...   I'm not sure.  It escapes me as I type.

There were some areas where you could go inside the living quarters.  I thought this was pretty cool seeing how the soldiers lived and seeing how miserable life would have been in you were only an inch or two taller than my 6' 1".  Yikes!

Captains quarters.

Chief Engineer quarters.

The dining room with a little Chinese boy wishing he had something to dine on.  Since he did not, he chose to express a bad attitude about the tour, and that's EXACTLY what his posture expresses in this photo!

All sorts of neat little nooks and crannies on the ship as I suppose they were designed to have the LEAST amount of dead space as possible.

And the stairways were steep too!

Being a computer programmer and a fella who just likes messing with stuff in general, this room was fascinating!

Momma's feeling all fancy and, as such, is doing a fancy walk.  In the meantime, Robby is wondering how he landed in such a family!

Everybody needs a little stress release, right?  Rob went into basketball mode and was pretending to drive on people, breaking their ankles with his stellar moves.

I like this picture looking straight down the side of the ship with a boat at the U.S.S.  Arizona, dropping off the next tour.

The guns on the back end of the ship.

 After this, we went back off the ship, had some lunch and did some shopping, but our tour of Pearl Harbor was pretty much over.

Hawaii Vaca, Post 5 - Pearl Harbor: U.S.S. Arizona

Another day, another tour! Something like that, anyway. 

Today we are heading out on a bus to Pearl Harbor, with folks from 4 other hotels in Honolulu, only we don't know that yet.  Since we were on Waikiki Beach, and towards the far end of it, we were the last folks picked up for tours and the last folks dropped off, generally speaking.
  
We get picked up, with another couple from Texas, out in front of our hotel.  We have zero paperwork or anything that indicates that we're supposed to be on this particular bus.  Our driver, Cousin Dwight, senses the urgency of us lacking said paperwork and said, "Relax!  You're in Hawaii now.  We can do this."  or something to that effect. 

He handled it and we were on our way.

Now, I can say, that of all the bright spots of our vacation, Cousin Dwight was pretty close to the top!  The dude had me busting a gut laughing a good majority of the time and was a fantastic tour guide.  He talked about everything from drivers who can't read signs, to restaurants, history, vulcanism, respect for what we're to visit on this day, typhoons, immigration, palaces, and various other stuffs.  As I've said previously and will certainly repeat again, I love it when you get someone like Cousin Dwight who teaches you a great many things on tour. I'm old and I'll forget, but the boys are young and spongy with their respective memory's and they were learning even though they didn't know it.

Or at least they didn't let on!  Sneaky little critters...

Some favorite Cousin Dwight "isms" (I know you can't hear his voice, but just trust me!!  He sounded a bit like Rafiki from the Lion King, "You follow ol' Rafiki, he know de way".):
"How's that!?"

"How you like that!?"

"Hawaii is all about immigration.  We have all kinds of different cultures and they're reflected in our restaurants.  Recently we had a French restaurant open on the corner to right (pointing to a Jack In The Box) Jacques In The Box.".

"Now you know the truth, and the truth will set you free!"

"Haa Haaaaaaaaaaa!!!"

and one that's not funny, but rather, quite repulsive:
"Please, what you're seeing today is living memorial.  If you're hunting Poke'mon, don't do it here!  We had a big problem with that shortly after the game was released.".




And so many, many more. I wish I would have had my notebook to write his quotes down.  He was something from another place!

As we start another day, we must start with the obligatory photo from the hotel lobby (open-air, of course!).

Once we're at Pearl Harbor but waiting to start our tours.

We were told a few months back, get to Pearl Harbor early in the morning as the tours for the day are sold out by 10am.  There's one group marching past us single file, another group waiting in the background and there were a great number of more groups (and buses!!!) that are not pictured.  Our tickets came with our travel package, so we were good, but man, they weren't kidding!!!

On our ferry out to the U.S.S. Arizona Memorial.   We passed by a few other ships in the harbor.  This baby was BIG!

Another one, not quite as big.

We've arrived...  and it's very humbling, just like Cousin Dwight warned us.  I was a little 'taken aback' by how emotional I was looking at the remains of the ship and knowing that there are full remains of a good number of men in the sunken ship below us.  Whew!

Hard to see in the photo, but someone, possibly with a loved one still aboard, climbed down in there and hung lei's on the ladder.  Chills upon chills when I noticed them...

I don't have many words for some of these and the pictures themselves don't do the memorial justice, so I'll just shut my trap for a few.

Ahhh...  the black tears!  Diesel fuel has been slowly leaking out ever since the attacks.  Legend has these pools on the water as Black Tears from the men who perished.

On the very far right of the photo is the U.S.S. Missouri.  The United States entry into WWII was from the attack on Pearl Harbor and the treaty to end the war was signed on the U.S.S. Missouri, so you have the representation of the beginning and end of the war from the U.S. perspective.  We will see MUCH more of that ship in the next post.

My fams looking down at the wreckage.

This is a shot of us leaving the memorial to get back on the ferry.  I took it because there were a number of veterans on the memorial with us and it was fascinating and heartbreaking at the same time to listen to them talk to each other.  The pride and sadness in their voice and stories will not be forgotten!  Those two in front of the lady were two in the conversation and it was not lost on me, that I was at this memorial, a free man visiting with my family, because of men like these two!!  Harrowing!

From the air, the white memorial was placed so that it made a cross with sunken Arizona beneath it.

The marker for the U.S.S. Nevada.

Just a random shot of the bridge over the harbor.  The Admiral Clarey Bridge on Ford Island Boulevard, which is the only way to get to Ford Island, the home of the Pearl Harbor Naval Base where the U.S.S. Missouri is docked.

One of the two, circle of names.

A side view of the anchor from the U.S.S. Arizona.

Full on view!

Knee High by the 4th of July?

In my hustle to get vacation pictures sorted, edited and posted, I nearly forgot to post our annual 4th of July photo taken by a cornfield!  This year, the pic was shot on July 8th, so you'll have to exercise your imagination to subtract four days of growth off of the corn... 

Hawaii Vaca, Post 4 - Hiking at Diamond Head

Todays fun and adventure? Diamond Head State Monument! 

A 300,000 year old (give or take a few days...) crater that sits on the edge of Honolulu, on the island of O'ahu. It totals about 375 acres of land with a hike to the summit reaching around 560 feet.  

The trail was initially built in 1908 as part of the island of O'ahu's defense system.  Now it's just here to kill us overweight and out-of-shape folks...  sort of a "thinning of the herd" type thingy.

This seems like a good idea since we're here and all...

We didn't take these pictures, obviously, as we would have needed some type of flying vessel or a various super-power to fly on our own.  None of us has revealed such powers to date, so I relied on the informative Bing.com to supply with an areal shot or 3 (or four!).

The lad, with me taking the picture since we're lagging behind, as Caleb "the family mountain goat" continues to ascend at a ridiculous pace!

This was fun.  No really, it was!  This picture was actually taken on the trek back down, but I included it here.  We had stopped at this point because Robby wanted to descend the exact same path in which his ascension had occurred, while I wanted to go around the "outside",  and this was our meeting point.  The fun part was, getting to watch the people who had just come up the crazy rocky part of the hike, thinking they were close to the top, and when they popped out of that little door on the right, every single one of them looked to their left first, then back to their right, followed by a muttering of something like, "Oh, $h!+...".  It was great fun to watch!

The lad, still happy on our ascension.

Both lads, both happy!

Our little happy, marching mountain goat, Calebber McCheese!  I think he could have jogged up the silly trail and still been able to breathe at the top...

View number 1 where you can see other hikers at the left of the photo, and you can see one of the military look-outs towards the middle right of the picture.  Oh, and there's some ocean if you're into that kind of thing.

Another similar but slightly different view.  There's a small town down there on the coast.  You can see a church steeple just slightly below the middle of the photo.

Near the top.  That's Honolulu in the background.

Just... look!

I thought this was cool.  At the summit, you can see straight along the ridge line of the crater over to the next military outlook with Honolulu in the background.

Caleb at the summit!

Family pic at the place where we enjoyed watching others at the base of the big staircase in the picture towards the top of this post!  Honolulu is to left of the photo and other stuff is behind us...  ;-)

A pic already made famous and only a couple of million "shares on facebook" away from going full-on viral, my big, tired sweaty carcass about 3/4 the way up.  That's about a 300 foot drop right behind me.  I think, from other old equipment around this site, that it used to be a pulley system to get equipment/supplies up to the lookout points, but I could be entirely wrong since I'm just making that up.

That's it for this hike!