Day 9 - Voting in Honolulu!

 

We've been waking up early, but we were both sleeping when Dave’s alarm went off. We got ourselves up and out & caught our Uber to Pearl Harbor. We sort of had time to watch an introductory movie, but the movie times don’t sync with the tour times so we had to leave early. We took the boat out to the memorial and walked around. I understand why people go there.

Our next stop was the Foster Botanic Gardens, because we really like botanic gardens. This is a very small one in the middle of the city. They have a map with 21 points of interest, most of which are trees. I liked how the paths and the order of the things to look at had pretty much nothing to do with each other; in fact to get from 19 to 20 you could either go halfway around the garden again or step up a short wall. Yes, we did the wall. Some favorites were the sausage tree, the cannonball tree, and the black pepper tree with actual green peppercorns. Photos in reverse order

 The Botanic Gardens are on the same hop on, hop off trolley route as the ship, and our tickets from yesterday were still good. So we waited for the trolley and rode it 3 stops to the statue of Kamehameha I which is across the street from the Royal Palace but more importantly is a block away from the post office.

We didn’t realize until just before we left that our ballots (Oregon is all vote by mail as I think everyone now knows) wouldn’t arrive before we left, and it was too late to get absentee ballots. So we had our house sitter put them in a priority mail envelope and send them general delivery to a post office near the ship. While we were on the trolley Dave got a notification that they’d arrived at the very post office we were about to be near! All is well! Except when we got there the mail person told us they don’t do general delivery. Dave just kept showing him the notification, and eventually he sent us to talk to his supervisor, who said the same thing. Dave kept doggedly showing her the notification and eventually she went and got the envelope. Apparently, the USPS website is wrong about this post office doing general delivery, but it all worked out. We took the ballots back to the ship, ate lunch, voted, and went out and found a mailbox. We’ll see if they make it.

 

Then we had a pretty slow afternoon of reading and relaxing. We’re sure Honolulu is a great place but somehow we don’t ever find the part of it that we can love. We both took little naplets and woke up in time for dinner, which was delicious and a good time. Turns out that coincidentally most of us are going to the Pinnacle tomorrow night for the Morimoto pop-up.

After dinner we went to the show, Erwin G Urbi, whose show was as fun as his name. And I’d like to clarify that I think his name is pretty fun. He sang mostly Hawai’ian songs, and then for some reason he closed his show with Nessun Dorma. It seemed like an odd choice anyway, but seemed even odder because DJ Bucciarelli started singing it as part of his show.

Then we went to Officer & Guest karaoke by the midships pool, which was mostly good singing by the officers and poor singing by the guests. What we want to know is why people who aren’t going to sing go to it? I still can’t answer that question for myself. 

It’s great to be back at sea and have the ship rock us to sleep. So far my brilliant engineering fix to hold the bathroom door open is working.