February 11, 2026
Today we took a tour of Pearl Harbor and Honolulu, which turned out to include a nice drive across Oahu.
The Pearl Harbor Memorial includes buildings. exhibits and monuments, and it’s impressive. We saw a good documentary about December 7th, and several exhibits about events before and after the attack. We hadn’t appreciated that the army had parked its aircraft wingtip to wingtip because it was concerned about sabotage, rather than an air attack.
The exhibits included a large model of the Japanese aircraft carrier Yamamoto, in enough detail that it shows figures working on the airplanes on deck.
We rode a launch to see the Arizona Memorial, but the winds were too high for us to board the memorial itself, which is directly over the sunken Arizona. Oil from the Arizona is still coming up very slowly, and they say it will continue for about 25 more years.
From the Pearl Harbor Memorial our guide drove us across Oahu, in part on Hawaii’s only Interstate Road. Why an Interstate when it can’t connect to any other states? Don’t know. During the ride we saw some interesting geography, which reminded us that Hawaii is a series of volcanic islands.
We stopped at a lookout point about 1200 feet up from which we could see across the rest of Oahu, including a golf course and breaking waves.
As we rode, our guide talked about Hawaiian history, including King Kamahamehama the Great, who united the islands in the late 1600s, and became the first king of all the islands. The Hawaiian people were warriors, so the unification involved several battles. In one, King Kamahamehama’s warriors fought the enemy to the edge of a cliff, and about 400 enemy warriors were pushed/jumped off it. The edge of the cliff was just to the side of the lookout where the last photo was taken, and is about in the photo shown here.
Back in Honolulu, we saw the Hawaii State House and the Royal Palace. You’ll see that the columns around the State House are tapered like palms, and expand at the top like palm fronds.
The statue is King Kamehameha.
We asked our guide where we could find authentic Hawaiian food for dinner, and he recommended a restaurant near the QM2, the Highway Inn.
The food was delicious. Except for poi. The tray on the lower left in this picture has pork Lau Lau, which is pork wrapped in taro leaves, Kalua pig, sweet potatoes, and on the very bottom left a coconut desert that was like a flan. To the left of the tray is a bowl of potato-macaroni salad, and above the tray is a dish of Spam and fried rice. These last two are favored Hawaiian dishes and we liked them. The grey/brown semi-liquid in the bowl at the bottom of the tray in the middle is poi. It was pretty low on flavor and tasted about the way it looked. However, if you mixed in some of the Hawaiian semi-salsa shown at the top left of the tray, as recommended by our waitress, it was pretty good.
Tomorrow, we go to Kona,
Dottie and Mal
