Thursday, February 3rd, 2005- Hawaii

Amanda and I woke up, for the second day in a row, at 6am. We hit up the 7am bus to go to the North Shore of the island via the scenic route. The trip in all took about 2 hours to get to our destination of the most northern point of the island, Turtle Bay. As we rode the bus, the city streets slowly turned into mountains, then to valleys, and then finally open land. Shrimp farms became a common sight with scores of rectangle shaped ponds.
We reached the Turtle Bay Resort around 9am and went down to the public beach. For the most part, the beach was deserted as we laid out and also collected coral until about 11am when it began to drizzle. Before we left the beach, we walked along a pier of lava rock that ran perpendicular to the beach. We then walked around the resort and saw the site of the radar center that had first detected the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor (the info wasn’t used because they thought that the planes were American).
We then continued on the bus to a small town named Halewia that had many small shops and restaurants. We ate at a little Thai restaurant (that probably was the best Thai food I’ve ever had) and then we stopped off to get shaved ice (similar to a snow cone), a Hawaiian delicacy.
Our trip ended as we continued on the bus down to the Dole Plantation. I had no idea how much info one could learn about pineapples. Basically it was a tourist haven that was very similar to Hershey Park, well, without the amusement rides, characters, candy, and ... fun. The plantation consisted of a huge gift shop to get all your Dole accessories (use your imagination) with an adjoining snack bar with everything made from pineapple (the ice cream was very popular). For $5 we could walk through the world’s largest maze, or for $3.50 walk through a garden, or for $7 one could ride a miniature train around an empty pineapple field. The fun would have been endless, however Amanda and I choose to partake in such “fun.” We instead watched Mary, a Dole employee, demonstrate to us the proper ways to pick and cut a pineapple. Mary really didn’t have the script memorized so she just read off of it which still intrigued the country bumpkins and Japanese tourists around us. And when Mary was finished with her demonstration everyone swooped in like vultures to grab a piece of pineapple. These people were very serious about their pineapple, you would have thought it was gold. Let me just say that I have spent my whole life cutting pineapples the wrong way (well not me. My mom has). If you want to learn the right way then you should definitely check it out for yourself.