Sigh….
Our trip to Hawaii was…amazing. Just amazing. In fact, it was quite nearly perfect.
My mother dreamed all her life of going to Hawaii, and at some point after she had safely seen her two children off to lives of their own, she put her foot down, announcing to my father that they were going. This was sometime in the 1990s. Since then, she has gone to Hawaii something like a dozen times. For this last visit, she treated my family and I to going along with her, as part of her celebration for having turned 80 this past August.
If I count this Hawaii trip as a gift, and I do, it might well be the greatest gift I’ve ever received. This would probably blow the mind of my second-grade self (that’s the year I got an electric train), but seriously, this trip was a gift that to be surpassed would probably have to be along the lines of someone giving me their kidney.
For various reasons, I’d never really thought about going to Hawaii myself. It was a place that I knew about, but didn’t really hold out a great deal of hope for visiting personally. Now, all I can think about is going back.
I’m not going to wax poetic at length here about that trip (though I will have a few more posts about it, focusing on a couple of specific things), but if you’re curious, you can see a lot of what we saw via my Flickr albums. I’ve organized just about every picture I took in Hawaii into these albums. I haven’t gone through and captioned every photo, but I’ve done a lot of them.
- Hawaii 2021: This album was going to be my “All the Hawaii” photos album, but then I realized that I needed to split them up more, so this one ended up incomplete. (I put all of the selfies and photos of The Wife and I in this album, though!)
- Hawaii 2021, Food and Drink: Self-explanatory. I have never eaten so well on a trip as I did on this trip. I have also not imbibed so well as I did on this trip, which is quite a thing given that we live near one of the United States’s great wine regions. (Food will probably be a post of its own, but meantime, here are pics.)
- At the Byodo-In Temple: I took a bunch of pictures in this one place, so it gets its own album.
- Pearl Harbor: Another location-specific album. We did not get to go to the USS Arizona Memorial, due to damage to the docks (Oahu was hit by a big storm the week before we got there), but Pearl Harbor is still a deeply moving place to visit.
- Sunsets and Rainbows: Self-explanatory. See this post for meditation on a theme.
- Candids and Streetscapes: Photos of people and places. I love people-watching, and Waikiki is a fantastic place to do so.
- Landscapes, Seascapes, and all the rest: This is the biggest album, encapsulating just about all of my “Oh WOW LOOK AT THAT!!!” moments throughout the trip. Even my crappy photos looked good!
Enjoy!
