Hawaii - Pearl Harbor

After yesterday’s disappointing tour at the Polynesian Cultural Center, I am happy to report that our tour of Pearl Harbor sites was excellent. The USS Arizona Memorial is reached by boat and spans the submerged deck of the battleship. It includes a wall of names of the soldiers lost in the attack. Deborah had visited the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum in 1995 when she was in Japan for business. She said seeing Pearl Harbor really completed the circle of events for her.


We got to climb all over the Battleship Missouri as well. Now decommissioned, its decks were the site of the signing of the Japanese surrender. It is docked facing the USS Arizona as if the two were bookends marking the beginning and end of the war.





And this is the USS Bowfin which is submarine to which we were too cheap to pay admission.

Hawaii - Polynesian Cultural Center

Sadly, we wasted over $200 yesterday at the Polynesian Cultural Center. It’s a Disney-like theme park run by the Mormons that consists of seven “villages” representing various Polynesian communities; e.g., Tahiti, Fiji, Hawaii, Somoa, Aotearoa (New Zealand), etc. As one guidebook I remember reading said, it’s a place where several Polynesian cultures are celebrated by the people who helped destroy them.

Figuring that we had spent plenty already we opted for the self-guided tour rather than shell out another 40 bucks for a guided tour. That robbed us of a certain amount of insight since there was very little written information provided in the “villages.” It did however save us from the dreaded audience participation moments when hapless tourists are forced to engage in embarrassing adaptations of ritual songs and dances. We also apparently missed out on weaving bits of palm frond into vaguely bird-like shapes and mounting them on sticks. Damn.

The staff was all very nice there, of course, but in a somewhat creepy, robotic way. They all asked us the exact same questions, as if reading from a script. “Where are you from?” “How long will you be in Hawaii?” “Have you been here before?” Then there were the relentless pitches to buy a trinket here, an ice cream there, a fruit drink over here…anything to squeeze a few more dollars from you. We were fairly successful in dodging the marketing pitches, as well as the robotic invitations to visit the LDS temple in town (BYU-Hawaii is also there).

On the plus side the grounds were beautiful, albeit in an artificial way, and the IMAX film on coral reefs was good, although we had actually seen it before. The luau included a bland dinner buffet and accompanying entertainment of equal quality. Deborah, ever the glass-half-full sort of person that she is, said of the buffet, “Well, I liked the roll.” We probably wouldn’t have been checking our watches during the subsequent evening show had we not already been worn down by the crass commercialism and endless repetitions of grass-skirted role players demanding the audience respond with “ALOOOOHA!” Thankfully that word also means goodbye.

Hawaii - Downtown

Today we took a bus into the downtown area. Our first visit was the Foster Botanical Gardens to view some strange and amazing flora. We dodged the dropping fruit of the Cannonball Tree. (If Sir Isaac Newton was sitting under this plant rather than the proverbial apple tree his only insight would have been that he just suffered a severe concussion). Photos of this and other vegetative wonders are below.

A quick and inexpensive lunch followed at a hole-in-the-wall eatery at the edge of Chinatown. Despite the fact that our meals were served directly from the dishes sitting on display in the front window, it was very tasty. No food poisoning resulted.

We walked around the downtown area admiring the buildings and yet more amazing trees, with the Honolulu Academy of Arts as our final stop. It’s a beautiful building with a great collection which we sadly ran out of time to see. It will be a must stop on our next visit to Honolulu.

The infamous Cannonball Tree

Hawaii - Waikiki

We arrived around noon, checked into our hotel, and quickly changed into shorts and sandals. I’m guessing this will be the standard dress code for the remainder of the trip. We had a great buffet lunch (not all buffets are bad, just most of them) at Duke’s. We spent the rest of the afternoon and early evening walking around Waikiki and soaking up the warmth and the fresh breezes. You can’t look at palm trees and not smile. And those otherworldly Banyan Trees! There is a painting waiting to happen.

Behold the beached whale!

The Plan

A few years ago, around the time George W. Bush was inexplicably reelected, when school boards in Kansas were advocating the teaching of Creationism in science classes, and when our foreign policy consisted of invading oil rich nations on manufactured evidence and renaming congressional cafeteria fare “freedom fries,” my long-term interest in living abroad was rejuvenated with even greater vigor. Fortunately, my lovely wife Deborah has an adventurous spirit and a shared interest in foreign lands. She was more than willing to drop our easy but somewhat routine lives in Olympia to embark on a succession of “scouting missions” to far off lands, particularly if it meant she could stop working. The goal of these missions was to find that one place (or places) where we could see ourselves living full time at some point in the future. And avoiding the dreary northwest winters by skipping off for months at a time is not exactly an afterthought.

The parts of the plan all fell into place. We sold our house and built a new one which we share with my parents: they live downstairs, we live upstairs. Our new space is about half the size of our previous home, but it’s enough. This arrangement reduces our monthly expenses, lets us spend more time with my folks while in Olympia, and gives us a built-in cat sitter while we are away.

Deborah sold her hair salon, but still has the option to rent a chair on occasion to service her most devoted clients when we are home. In keeping with her status as a renaissance woman, she also has started part-time interior decorating and skin care businesses to generate supplemental income and keep her from getting bored. On her off days she will be working on a cure for cancer.

As an artist, I have the advantage of being able to work anywhere. Mind you, the larger pieces aren’t going to fit in my suitcase and will have to be reserved for the Olympia studio. But the small ones I can handle. I can also do a bit of sketching and prep work while on the road. The magic of the internet should make it easy to keep in touch with everyone back home, and to pay bills and track investments.

So where to go? We have a long list of places in which we would either consider living or would just want to visit (or visit again): New Zealand, Australia, Thailand, Bali, India, Spain, Portugal, Greece, Italy, France, Mexico, Costa Rica, Turkey…and probably many others that will enter our radar. Our initial excursion was going to be a six month trip to New Zealand, a country I had visited about 15 years ago and loved. But Deborah has a friend from her New York days named Lorraine who married an Australian and now lives in Brisbane — “Practically next door to New Zealand” according to Deborah (actually well over a thousand miles). So a side trip to Australia was added, which then morphed into 3 months in Australia and 3 months in New Zealand.

Then we started researching the option of house sitting, where we would look after people’s homes and pets while they are away on vacation in exchange for free accommodation. This, we thought, in addition to saving us a huge amount of money, would really give us the chance to see how real people live in real neighborhoods, as opposed to the usual tourist routines when you are stuck in a hotel. We joined a website listing such opportunities primarily in Australia, and met with much more success than we could have imagined. As we accepted more and more Australian house sitting assignments it became clear we weren’t going to make it to New Zealand this year after all. No matter: there’s always next year. In the end we managed to fill up nearly our entire schedule in Australia with house sitting except for a handful of days.

We are starting our trip with a few days in Hawaii to break up the long flight (10 hours is a long flight, but 14 or 15 is much worse). From Hawaii we fly to Brisbane where we will stay with Deborah’s friend Lorraine for a few days. Then we start our first house sitting assignment for Diane in the Brisbane suburb of Runcorn. We’ll look after her two King Charles Spaniels for 3 weeks. Next we fly to Adelaide to house sit for Andrew and care for his two Staffy crosses for 10 days. We’ll spend the following two weeks in Adelaide as well; hopefully house sitting again, although the assignment for that period is still uncertain at this point.

From Adelaide we fly to Sydney to house sit for Paul and Sharon who have two Rottweilers, a Cockatiel and some other birds. We will actually be spending Christmas with them. They were originally planning to take a cruise for two weeks but those plans fell through. Oh, and they sold their house and moved to a different location. But “no worries, mate,” they want us to come anyway. They will take some trips locally so our services will still be required part of the time. And when they aren’t away they offered to show us around a bit. Yes, the Australians are a friendly lot.

After our time in Sydney we will make our way into the Snowy Mountains via Canberra, the national capital, where we will stay a few days before ending up in Jindabyne. There won’t be pets to look after in Jindabyne but we will be looking after a Ski Lodge. It will be their summer off-season so the patrons will be few, but we will be taking people’s money and handing them their keys and that’s about it. A maid service takes care of cleaning the rooms. We are asked to just try and be there between 4pm and 6pm when people usually check in. Otherwise we are free to do as we like. We’ll be in Jindabyne for 8 weeks, leaving in mid-March.

Next we make our way back to Sydney to fly north to Cooloola Cove on the Sunshine Coast north of Brisbane. We’ll house sit there for Kaz, who isn’t so much interested in house sitting as she is in decorating ideas. Deborah listed her interior decorating skills in our profile on the house sitter website, and Kaz picked up on that. We’ll spend 4 weeks in Cooloola Cove before flying back to Sydney to embark on our big splurge of this trip, a one-way cruise from Sydney to Hawaii. It makes several stops in route including the Cook Islands, Tahiti, Bora Bora, Moorea (another French Polynesian island), and Maui, before ending up in Honolulu. The day we arrive in Honolulu is the day we fly home, almost exactly six months from when we started.

So that’s plan. I’ll periodically add text and pictures as we travel, internet connectivity permitting, and let all who are interested follow along in our journey. I’ll keep you posted.

Blake