I’ll tack on the sunrise pictures from the morning of the adventures of the day of blog post topic moving forward.

Brian’s friend Ty from when he served on the USS San Fransisco is in the Navy Reserves and had orders for a couple weeks in Hawaii. He and his girlfriend, Megan, arrived on Sunday and we gave them a proper hello by decorating their necks with a Lei and ate dinner at Waikiki brewing in Waikiki. Megan came to us before Ty, they came on separate flights, and I admired her self confidence enough to come meet people she’s never met before.

With all things Navy, she’s winging her scheduled according to what Ty can accomodate (which has changed… and changed… and changed again in the short time they’ve been here) On Monday she headed our way for the afternoon, and I didn’t have a lot of work going on so I played hooky. In the morning I had a stress test appointment for my heart. I haven’t been quite the same since having COVID, so it’s more reassurance that nothing is wrong organ wise. I passed with flying colors.

After, we met for lunch at Kapalawai market, a pretty famous local Hawaiian deli/convenience store. The food is really good beach food. We took our sandwiches and made our way to Lanikai so she could see the beach. We went for a quick swim, walk, and then went to the Ho’omaluhia Botanical Garden. It is a beautiful hidden gem, and free! Although I intend to donate.

It’s a very big park so it’s organized such that you drive to different parking locations and walk to explore a section of the park. We started at the first section to visit the lake. It’s a huge coy pond with tons of coy.

I’ll jump forward to our third spot, which was the “seasonings” path, we think. It had a really great view of the lake, and the only “Seasoning” we recognized was a tree that smelt like popcorn. As we were walking toward it, Megan was wondering if someone was eating popcorn.

We went to another section (this was our second stop) that has a great view of the mountains and the ocean. Here, there’s a plaque explaining you’re in the center (Caldera) of what once was a volcano. The volcano geography is what gives Hawaii the unique ridges on the mountain sides. We could see the view of the bay. The walk up to the viewpoint is awkwardly steep, so the lady told us to walk backwards, also so we could see the view. The mountains make up the Ko’olau Range. koʻolau means “windward” in Hawaiian

The park closes relatively early, at 4pm, so we left and explored the Marine Corps Base (I wanted to show her more private, quieter beach options). I’ll make a post about how in love I am with that base later. We tried to go to the commissary, the military grocery store, but it’s closed on Mondays… so went to Target instead. Then she went back to Waikiki.

That was my hooky half day. Definitely going back to the gardens with Brian and to see other parts.