Pearl Harbor and tour

We started the day at the conference with a fabulous speaker.....  Wally Amos.  Remember the guy that started the Famous Amos cookie company?  Well, THAT's the guy that talked to us.  He is actually a pretty inspiring story.  About 20 years ago, he was ousted from his own company and forbidden to use his own name or image in any subsequent businesses.  It is amazing how he has recovered from that.

After the morning, they had arranged for us to take a brief tour of Honolulu and then onto the Pearl Harbor memorial.

There is a tiny little Chinatown in Honolulu.  By tiny, I mean 4 or 5 blocks.  Wish we would have had time to explore instead of just drive by!

Then we stopped at the statue of King Kamehmeha (spelling??).  He is certainly a revered figure in the islands.

Then it was on to Pearl Harbor.  They have a marvelous series of two museums that take you through the lead up to the attack and then through the actual attack.  Once you go through that, you go into a theater to see some actual film footage of the attack and the aftermath.  It is incredibly sobering and sad.  

After that, you would typically board a Navy tender boat to take a ride out to the actual USS Arizona memorial.  Unfortunately, that wasn't the case for us!  Apparently, today the water was too rough for the tenders to run (this is a very rare occurence, we were told).  So we didn't get to go over to the memorial!  Darn!

The best I can do is this long distance view of what we saw from across the harbor.

We were able to get up close to the anchor from the USS Arizona.......

Oh, I DO have to show this pic of lunch.  :)  We had bento boxes delivered to us on the bus so that we could eat on the way to the memorial.  It was actually very good.  But note the meats in the box.  All meat groups were covered......  beef, chicken, fish and of course, SPAM!  Chuckle.  Reminded me of my Mom, who loves it!