Day 7:Pearl Harbor

We had to plan our last day in Hawaii more carefully, because our flight left at 10:00 at night, and we didn't want to be wearing wet swimming suits home on our red eye flight. Kevin read about a short drive up the mountain from Honolulu that was supposed to be sort of like the Road to Hana on Maui, so we decided to do that. First, though, we stopped by Leonard's bakery for the second morning in a row to get some malasadas diliciosas. Some of the best baked Hawaiian goods are from Portuguese sailors, including Hawaiian bread, but these malasadas were something else: sugar, cinnamon sugar, or banana, coconut, or chocolate filled. Here's a great shot of me and the Leonard's bakery dumpster.

And here we are driving up the road to Round Top, above Honolulu.

And this is what the road was like as we drove around. It sprinkled on us a bit, and the whole place smelled like flowers. I'd love to live up here!

In the afternoon we decided to go to Pearl Harbor. It's free to get in, but Kevin and I decided it was worth it to spring for the $5 audio tour as we went through the museum and waited our turn to see the film and ride the boat out to the Arizona memorial. I think the audio tour was totally worth it. I'm a bit of an NPR-junkie, so I've grown accustomed to learning through listening to compiled audio snippets and vignettes told by those who experienced these attacks over 65 years ago.

I'd been to Pearl Harbor once or twice before, but this time it had a lot more meaning to me. Before I was so young that I accepted history as fact and didn't question why things happened the way they did. But this time I was immensely curious to know why the Japanese thought it would be a good idea to bomb the U.S. (we had stopped selling them oil and had closed off the Panama Canal to them, so they thought they'd take out our Pacific fleet and then quickly take over all of the resource-rich French Asian territories before we had time to regroup), or why we hadn't detected the planes coming in (we thought they were our own planes coming from California), or why Japan joined with Germany and Italy (with the invasion of France, these French colonies were ripe for the picking by Japan).

Here's what remains of one of the gun towers of the sunken USS Arizona.

This was also a neat experience for me because my grandpa served as a colonel in WWII in Asia, and despite that I've always studied and learned more about the European side of the war, and here I got to immerse myself in a totally new perspective.