Pearl Harbor

 On our last full day in Honolulu, Linda had made reservations to see Pearl Harbor.  Pearl Harbor is a real tourist draw, consisting of (a) the Arizona Memorial, (b) the USS Missouri, (c) a submarine museum, and (d) an aviation museum.  Each of these, while more or less close to each other, has its own admission fee. The Arizona Memorial doesn’t have an actual entrance fee, but you have to get a reservation, and the reservations cost $1 a person.  The others have entrance fees of around $20 or $30.  We decide to just see the Arizona and the USS Missouri.

Taking a bus from Waikiki to Pearl Harbor takes about an hour.  The #20 bus drops you right in front of the park.


Once inside things are a bit more chaotic.  The Missouri is on Ford Island, so you then have to take a park shuttle over to Ford Island.


You can either join a tour, or just wander.  We just wandered.  If you stood in one place, a tour might come along, and you can just listen in on what the tour guide is saying.


The important part of the Missouri for us was that it was the ship where the Japanese surrendered at the end of World War II.  Linda’s Father had been in the Pacific in WW2, as a navigator on one of the big planes, and he was part of the fly over of planes at the surrender.

Then it was back to the main park for the Arizona.  The Arizona was one of the ships that was sunk in the attack on Pearl Harbor.  One of only a couple that were not then raised and put back into service.  It was left where it sank, as a memorial to all those that lost their lives at Pearl Harbor.  They then built a memorial building over it in 1962.

You have to take a ferry out to the memorial



And the memorial itself is pretty sparse.  Three rooms.  One with a list of all the soldiers who died in the Arizona.  You can sort of see parts of the Arizona that lie in the water below the memorial, but it’s not really recognizable as anything.  The best for that is a diagram that they have showing what the ship looks like


A half hour later, the ferry takes you back to the main park.

And then we caught the bus back to our room, and started packing to check out tomorrow and fly to the Big Island of Hawaii for the second part of our trip.


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