Hawaii Day 3: I Guess We're Not Really Jeep People

By Tuesday, I was ready to get out of the city for a while. We rented a Jeep thinking that it would be fun to put the top down and drive around the island. What we didn’t anticipate was getting a big 4-door version. Trying to fold up the top on that behemoth was nearly impossible! There was no instruction manual in the rental, so we ended up watching a YouTube video. We folded it up as much as we could before we got frustrated with it, and then we rode around for the rest of the day praying the top didn’t fly off as we were driving down the road! (Sorry, no pics!)

Other than that minor technical difficulty, the rest of the day was fantastic! We went to Pearl Harbor and got tickets for the U.S.S. Arizona Memorial. We had a few hours before the next available ferry to the memorial site, so we drove out to the Dole Plantation about 30 minutes away. We went through the World’s Largest Maze and had some fresh pineapple and Dole Whip for a snack before we headed back to Pearl Harbor.
The kids were very well-behaved at the memorial. There is a short video about the attack before you go out to the memorial, and then you have about 15 minutes to see the actual site. That was just the right amount of time for us. Jeff and Nathan listened to the audio tour. I was most fascinated by the oil that still leaks out of the sunken ship more than 70 years after it was bombed. After that somber time, we needed an afternoon of fun! We headed up to the North Shore. It was so laid back and just the break we needed from the busyness of Honolulu. Everywhere we stopped along the 2-lane highway had something awesome: beautiful beaches, huge waves, even sea turtles! Our last stop was at Waimea Bay Beach Park in Haleiwa where Nathan jumped off of the famous cliffs. On our way “home”, we stopped for our first Hawaiian shave (not “shaved”) ice.