Ko Olina--Oahu's "Secret" Oasis

12/8/05 – 4:20 PM

What a wild day it’s been! I feel like we’ve been going non-stop. We got up as planned at 5:30, and met Diana & Jim at the Hale Koa at 7:00 and headed for Hickam to play golf at their Par 3 course. It was really a nice course, and I did fairly well—made par on Puka (Hole) # 7. After we were done playing golf, we headed to our old favorite breakfast place on Hickam—Orville and Wilber Wright’s Café and Grill. They’ve done a lot of renovating there, and it’s really nice. The omelets were delicious. But we weren’t lucky enough to see any ships go by in the channel behind it. I’ll never forget that time that Frank & I were having breakfast there and a big aircraft carrier went by, heading out to sea. It was an awesome sight.

After breakfast, we went to the Navy Exchange at Pearl Harbor—a massive place with a gorgeous turreted ceiling painted by the sea life artist, Wyeland. I found two dresses for tonight’s luau and couldn’t decide between them so I got both.

After we left the exchange and stopped at an outlet mall in Waipahu, we headed on for Ko Olina, the resort that Barbara always raved about—the one with seven lagoons open to the public. Well, we found one of them, and let me tell you, Barbara did not exaggerate when she talked about how wonderful this place is. Picture a huge semi-circle of water surrounded by rocks on two sides, the beach on the other and the last side open to the sea. It was like a huge green swimming pool. And that was only one of the lagoons. (Oddly enough, Oahu's tourist magazines don't mention Ko Olina's public lagoons, so if we hadn't known about them from an insider, we would never have discovered this wonderful place.) We swam for about an hour and then came back to Waikiki to get ready for tonight.

This will be my first luau.