Day 90 – Hawaii

Tuesday, March 22nd, 2008

We ended up getting into Hawaii really early in the morning, earlier than any other port that we’ve been to. We’re basically only stopping here to refuel but they’re being nice and letting us off for a day. Anyway, we were able to get off the ship shortly after 9am this morning. The first thing I did was call Verizon to reactivate my phone. For some reason they had some extensive troubles with that and it took like an hour, but I didn’t really care because I was able to use my phone for the rest of the day! (this was really exciting for pretty much everyone on the ship). We then got some internet at a nearby Starbucks for about an hour. Our ship docked in the port of Honolulu, which is in Oahu Island and really close to Waikiki beach.

After getting internet we headed to the Waikiki beach area to get some food. We ate at a place called Dukes which we soon learned was a famous restaurant in the area. We split a couple orders of delicious nachos and I had a bacon cheeseburger which was ‘oh so tasty’. Hah.

After filling up with food we headed down the beach a little ways to where we had scheduled some surfing lessons. None of us had ever been surfing before so we were all pretty excited about catching some waves in Hawaii. We had a good teacher (Keny) and I was able to get up on my first wave – very exciting! The hardest part about surfing (after our first time) is probably just getting up to speed with the waves by paddling. All of our arms were dead tired by the end of the day. I caught at least 5 different waves and rode them for a while. There was also another girl from the company that we went through that took some great pictures of us out there and on the waves so I’m excited to show you all those. Waikiki beach is a really pretty area, I wish we would have had a couple days to relax here. One day isn’t nearly enough! For the rest of the day we just hung out on the beach with some other SAS people that we ran into.

For dinner we wanted to check out a local sports bar to watch some baseball and just hang out, and we found a great place, but they wouldn’t let anyone under 21 in the bar and of the 10 of us, Jim still has a month to go until he’s 21 so we had to leave. Somehow though we found another place nearby that served some awesome pizza. Before we knew it we had to rush back to the ship so we didn’t receive dock time for being late. Customs in Hawaii is worse than any other port though, they make us go through two very tough security checks. It was like we were going into airport security every time we wanted to go back to the ship. This caused some really long lines about 30 minutes before on-ship time at 9pm. Thankfully, our dean came outside to tell us that we wouldn’t receive dock time as long as we were in line. I made it on the ship with a few minutes to spare though, just to be safe. I’ll definitely be coming back to Hawaii. One day is just a tease!