Day 8 - Honolulu, Hawaii

The Sail into the Honolulu Harbor was beautiful this morning.  We docked at the Aloha Tour in downtown Honolulu.  This morning our tour was “Tale of Two Palaces”.  We had a small tour bus with only 22 people on it.  Our first stop was the Pali Lookout – it was extremely windy and the short walk to the lookout was not easy as the wind was blowing right at us.  But the view was beautiful overlooking the eastern side of Oahu.

The next stop was Queen Emma’s Summer Palace – a small wooden home where Queen Emma, King Kamehameha IV and their son got away from Honolulu during the summer.  She spent her last years there after losing both her son and her husband in a very short time frame.   It has been restored and had a lot of period pieces from the Hawaiian monarchy.

The Iolani Palace is in downtown Honolulu and was built in the late 1880’s.  It was used as a state office building until the 1950’s when it was reclaimed and the restoration process started.  They are still looking for a lot of the contents that were sold off by the government who deposed the Queen of Hawaii and imprisoned her in the palace for 8 months.  It is a beautiful building and houses a lot of the recovered objects such as jewelry, crowns, and medals.  

We were back to the ship in early afternoon and grabbed a quick bite on the pool deck.  After meeting Tom and Martha for a drink, we left the ship and when next door to the Aloha Tower Marketplace for dinner.  The thing that surprised all of us was the size of the portions – they were huge.  We were used to the smaller portions as served on the ship so the regular size portions of a restaurant seemed really big.  We all agreed we liked the smaller portions better!  

The ship was pretty quite this evening as the World Cruisers were gone to a special dinner at the Iolani Palace.  We had noticed they were putting up tables, chairs and a band was setting up on the grounds of the Palace when we were there.  Sleeping will be easy tonight as we are docked overnight in Honolulu.