An earlier post mentioned that after our second trip to Hawaii we returned through Los Angeles to meet up with my wife’s family and our younger daughter.

Getty Museum. A number of my daughters’ friends were also in LA so we celebrated her birthday at the Getty Museum. It has a lovely location high on the hills overlooking LA. It also has a great restaurant where we held our celebration.

As the sign implies this is the Georgian Hotel – right by the beach in Santa Monica. We weren’t staying there, but I liked the facade.  Nice veranda restaurant overlooking the sea (across the road).

Again the sign says it all: Neptune’s Net on the roadside in Malibu.

On our final day in Los Angeles we went to the House of Blues and had a great time. Now back to chilly (this was early January) New York.  Below Eirah dancing at the House of Blues.

Statue at Kona International Airport

In an earlier post I mentioned that we would be coming back to Hawaii.  How could I be so certain?  In that post I also mentioned that our flight from Honolulu to Los Angeles had been cancelled.  The airline (unfortunately I can no longer remember the name) paid for a taxi into Honolulu; a night in a nice hotel including dinner and a taxi back to the airport the following day.  They also put us in first class for the flight to LA.  In addition they gave us two round trip tickets Los Angeles/Maui.  That’s how I knew we would be back.

And back we were the following year.  This time we only spent a couple of days on Maui, most of the time being on the Big Island. I didn’t immediately take a liking to the Big Island the way I had with Maui. The Hawaiian islands are very slowly moving over a volcanic hot spot. Maui passed over it a long time ago, but the Big Island is still squarely on top of it. The island is more rugged than Maui with black lava streams all over the place. Don’t get me wrong it’s still a lovely island, but not to me as nice as Maui.

The volcanoes are, however, spectacular.

Kilauea (I think)


Another view


Eirah

In looking back over the photos I was surprised that there weren’t very many. Most of them weren’t very good either – even by my pretty low standards. I think I was just starting to go into a period where I lost interest in photography. I felt that I wasn’t improving much and only seemed to take the camera out to shoot family events and scenic vacation shots. It took a couple of years and a new camera (purchased after I left the old one in a taxi in Geneva), a Panasonic Lumix LX3, to bring me out of this. Did the LX3 make my pictures better? No, of course not. No new camera can do that. What it did though was to re-stimulate my interest in taking pictures and all things photographic.

Player in a ‘sun ceremony’ – part of the hotel Luau.

In 2005 we went on vacation to Hawaii – specifically to Maui. This was the first time I’d been there. What a wonderful place! I really felt comfortable there. Of course parts of it are very “touristy” and other parts are just like the rest of the USA (e.g. A Starbucks around every corner). But the eastern side of the Island is largely undeveloped. To me the whole island has an almost magical feel.

Hana Coast

Roast Pig

Makenna Beach

Waterfall. I don’t recall which (there are at least 16) but possibly Alelele.  I wish it had been Helele’ike’oha because I like the name, but it isn’t.

We were supposed to fly back through Honolulu on the island of Oahu. We weren’t stopping there – just changing planes on route to Los Angeles for a News Years eve celebration with my wife’s family. Unfortunately (or maybe fortunately) there was a problem with the plane and we were forced to spend the night in Honolulu. The next flight was not until the following afternoon. As a “history buff” I’d always wanted to go to Pearl Harbour. Now I had a chance. I’d also always wanted to see a Battleship. I’m British and was disappointed to discover that no British battleship still exists. When you think that the UK was the pre-eminent naval power for so long it seems incredible that not one of these behemoths has been preserved. The USA has done a much better job. I had been thinking of going to see the USS Massachusetts in Fall River, Mass or the US New Jersey in Camden, New Jersey. Here I was just around the corner from the New Jersey’s sister ship: The USS Missouri, the very ship on which the Japanese surrender was accepted at the end of the Second World War. I couldn’t miss this opportunity so off I went. I would have liked to have visited the Arizona memorial too, but the lines were long and I didn’t have the time. Then it was off back to the hotel and to the airport. I left Hawaii with considerable regret. We would be back though…but that’s a topic for another post.

USS Missouri with the Arizona memorial in the background.

Some of the big guns of the USS Missouri.