Family Reunion

Today Mum, Dad and Erin arrived. Their hotel, the Outrigger on the Beach, is just on the other side of the market from us, only a few hundred metres away. We went there just a little before they arrived so that we could greet them with leis. They were tired but Erin was surprisingly perky, thanks to her travelling drugs, and insisted that we eat lunch at The Cheesecake Factory. I had a Hawaiian pizza and we all struggled to share a piece of Kahlúa cheesecake. (I didn't really need dessert but you can't go to The Cheesecake Factory and not order cheesecake!)

Cindy and I spent the afternoon showing them around the market and getting them oriented. Then we went out to dinner at The Hard Rock Café. Erin and Cindy ordered drinks that came with free hurricane glasses (they actually give you clean ones) and we had vouchers for a free gift, which just turned out to be a lanyard and pin but we received two.

Waikiki Beach

Today we shopped. We explored the market in front of our hotel and got some cheap souvenirs then caught a "trolley" (shaped like an old wooden tram but with bus wheels) over to the Ala Moana shopping centre. That was like most other American malls but have a couple of interesting shops like Hilo Hattie and As Seen on TV!
This evening we went down to the beach bar at the Hilton for a drink with my friend Matt who was coïncidentally in Waikiki for a chemistry conference and his wife. After a nice Hurricane we went to a tropical hamburger restaurant where all the waitresses were dressed in grass skirts.

Hawaii

Yesterday I went in to uni and marked a big stack of my students' final essays along with the professor and the other assistant instructors. I got home a little after lunch time and Cindy and I went to get the hire car that we planned to take to the airport the next morning. I had made the reservation a few weeks before and the car was ready for us (the guy started telling us aboutthe seat warmers) but when it came time to pay we discovered that Hertz does a full credit check on anyone paying with a debit card. After we ran around and got our social security numbers, it turned out that they would not let us hire the car at all. Our flight would leave too early for the Bloomington-Airport shuttle so we had to ask our friend Charly to take us. He's an early riser but it was still very kind of him to come pick us up at 3.30 am and drive an hour each way. The crazy part was that in the queue for security Cindy saw someone from her lab who had driven himself up - if only we had known!

We flew with US Airways because their flights to Hawaii go through Phoenix, Arizona and we didn't want a repeat of the Xmas before last when we spent a night in Chicago and our bags were lost. Because both legs of the trip were domestic, we didn't get any food, we had to buy it at the airport. That's not good for a 6-7 h flight to Hawaii because the food gets cold. US Airways was even worse than United in some ways, like trying to charge us $5 for headphones to watch the movie. But the trip itself was pretty uneventfull.

We got to the hotel around dinner time and went straight out for a cheap meal in a Chinese-Hawaiian takeaway.
I was feeling dizzy from exhaustion by that time because it was well after midnight in Indiana and I had had only a couple of hours sleep the night before and a couple more on the plane. But Cindy insisted that we couldn't go to sleep at 7 pm localtime so we wandered around a little touristy market for a bit before retiring for the night.

The hotel is quite nice, even the cheapest of Waikiki is pretty luxurious for us - I think it's the nicest hotel I've ever paid for.

Christmas Fare

I know I've mentioned pumpkin pie ice-cream before but an update is required: I've discovered that a luxury ice-cream brand here is making pumpkin ice-cream with cheesecake chunks in it!

I was going to take a photo of the fridge full of different egg-nogs, including Jack Daniels and pumpkin, but the shelves were a bit bare. Still, you'll be relieved to know that there's not one, but two varieties of egg-nog ice-cream (the slow-churned one is low fat):

That sounds like it could be good for Xmas in Hawaii!