New Year’s Eve in Hawaii

 The morning started out okay.  There were sirens in the night, but mostly I was able to sleep (we don’t expect that to be as easy tonight).  We had breakfast here — yogurt and bananas. Then Linda reported that she couldn’t find some osteoporosis pills she thought she had brought.  After searching everywhere (there is not a lot we can search here) we contacted Jennifer.  She found them at home and was able to get them in the mail today.  So should be here before the end of next week.

Then it was off to the Bishop museum.  We could take a #2 bus across town to a short walk from the museum.

I had thought the Bishop museum would be something to do with the Catholic religion, but no.  It is named after Bernice Pauahi Bishop, who was born into the Hawaiian Royal Family.  Her husband set up the Bishop Museum to hold royal heirlooms and has expanded to become the Hawaii State Museum of Natural and Cultural History.

The history of Hawaii royalty is very well defined.  It starts with Kamehameha a local island chieftain that conquered the others, to unite Hawaii in 1810, with himself as king.  The museum presents a complete family tree showing who married who and gave birth to who.  It lasted until 1893 when the queen at the time, Queen Liliuokalani, was overthrown by a bunch of businessmen who then got Hawaii annexed to the U.S. in 1898.

The museum presents both the history and prehistory of the islands, and the Polynesian people generally. It’s a forceful story, but the presentation can be lacking.  There are several floors, and exhibits, and we kept ending up going thru them backwards because when you entered the galleries, you could go left or right and nothing indicated which way to go.  Personally, I prefer to go forward thru time, from the past to the present.  But we ended up going backwards in time.

They also have a science museum, altho that is pretty minimal.  They have a planetarium and that had a pretty good show on the planets and the constellations.

Then it was back to town.  For days I had been trying to find an ATM to use.  Our credit union is part of a network of credit unions that agree to allow their members to use their ATMs without fees.  Our credit union has a URL for the network which allows you to search for ATMs close to a location.  But the locations just come back as a text list of addresses, which doesn’t make it easy to see where they are on the map. We tried walking to the nearest one to us on Friday, but it was “unexpectedly” closed. We are beginning to recognize some streets however and some plotting with Google maps showed that there should have been one just off the route that the #2 bus would take us from the Bishop Museum back to Waikiki.

So we got off, walked a couple blocks and found the Fort Street branch of the Aloha Hawaii Federal Credit Union, with it’s ATM, which had a message on the display saying “An error has occurred and this ATM is not working”.   So we gave up, walked across the street to the Bank of Hawaii, and used their ATM, paying a $4.75 fee.  As Linda pointed out, we were wasting more time trying to find a fee-free ATM than it was worth.  And even then, the Bank of Hawaii ATM was unable to print a receipt.  It seems nothing works completely anymore (if it ever did).

We got back on the #2 bus heading back towards Wikiki, with a planned stop to go to Walmart, but at the stop where we got off the bus, there was a Target at the corner, so we went there and bought paper towels and toilet paper and Kleenex for the room.  And they had Christmas M&M’s 70% off! So we got a bag.

Finally back at the room, we rested a bit before going out for the evening.  We stopped at a market down the street and got sushi and brown rice for dinner, taking it down to the beach to eat it as the sun went down.  We walked along the beach until just before 7:00, making it back to our room just as the ball dropped in New York, 5 hours ahead of us.  We are still up at 8:00, as it turns 2024 in Texas, but that’s all we plan on.   We have to be up at 6AM tomorrow to go out on a boat to see if we can whale watch.


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