Jellies at the Waikīkī Aquarium. If you get dizzy watching the repetition, click on the pause control at the bottom left.

We fly in to Paradise, Thursday, 1 March

Few pictures today—I didn’t even take any shots of Mark in the airport. But anyway, we got up very early and decided to eat the parking fee for staying at Lot C for twelve days instead of going with Super­Shuttle. In the event, we were glad to pay that $144 when we got back, instead of waiting in­ter­mi­nab­ly for a shuttle that would be going to the greater Pa­sa­de­na area.

The security at United’s Terminal 7 was pretty busy, but we got through without problems; the flight to Honolulu was uneventful as well. We waited only a little while for SpeediShuttle to take us to our hotel. We went downstairs to the hotel’s first-floor restaurant for a perfectly sat­is­fac­to­ry meal, both of us choos­ing Thai dishes.

A Banyan in the park (large image, small).

Mark in the park (large image, small).

Then we just walked along Kalakaua Avenue, the main drag of Wai­kī­kī, people-watching and window-shopping. Rather little of the latter, in fact, but we re­cog­nized at once that Devlin would be in ecstasy here. Loads of shops, some elegant and some tacky. The same can not be said of the tourists, whom I hope I’m not being too snobbish to name as the most ill-dressed bunch of people I’ve ever seen. Where were the acres and acres of beautiful bodies that were promised to me? Not here, nor on the wa­ter­front either, I discovered. For when we got to the beachier part of Wai­kī­kī beach, it was pretty much the same story.

But we did get to the Wai­kī­kī Aquarium, it’s a good one. As you see above, I made a video of sea jellies—that clip os only a small part of the total that I shot, but downloading anything longer might take too long.

As I recall, we had a nap after that, and then went out walking, looking for a likely restaurant. Almost everything was loud and touristy, and nothing at all appealed to us. Finally, I suggested going into a high-quality hotel, of which there certainly are many in the Wai­kī­kī neigh­bor­hood, and trying a restaurant there. What we hit on was the Mo­a­na Surfrider, plenty high quality, and the restaurant in it that we chose, The Veranda, was high quality too. I felt underdressed, since many of the clientele looked not like the strollers on Kalakaua but instead like they just came from some country club. We both had Petit Filet, just about the only meat on the menu that seemed to be of less than one pound in mass. It was perfectly cooked, and very tasty. From there, to bed, no partying, be­cause we had to get up early to get a plane to Kaua‘i for a pho­to­graphy-or­i­ent­ed tour that Mark had booked.

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