It’s pouring rain in Honolulu. Apparently yesterday while it was raining in Lahaina, Honolulu had their only sunny day in three weeks. But once our ship pulled into the harbor the rain swept back into town. This afternoon we were caught in a torrential downpour, the second in two days and returned to the ship looking like a couple of drowned rats. We wanted to go to Alan Wong’s for dinner but they are closed for renovations until next week. So even though this is our last chance for a dinner in Hawaii off the ship, we may very well stay aboard tonight. It just doesn’t seem worth the trouble of braving the weather again. We are finally warm and comfortable and feeling pretty mellow and a bit worn out from our afternoon.
We still managed to have some fun today. We went on a local food tour with Matthew & Keira and tasted some new things and had some very interesting conversations. The best thing we ate was something called a coco puff at the Liliha Bakery. The bakery itself is something of an institution and snot be if you find yourself in Honolulu or Waikiki. The coco puff is their specialty. It’s a large cream puff shell filled with chocolate cream (which was actually more like a pudding) and covered with a chantilly icing made with evaporated milk). It was surprisingly light, creamy, chewy, and well balanced. I loved the pudding-like consistency of the filling and the icing was almost salty with a bit of a tang.
The beaches at Waikiki were beautiful, even in the rain. People were still out surfing and as I watched them I wished for my bathing suit. When I was a teenager we vacationed on Paradise Island in the Bahamas. There was a brief rain shower each afternoon at around three. It was amazingly restful to float there in the warm Caribbean waters while this soft shower cascaded down from the sky. I wished that I could experience something like that here but the afternoon was chilly and the idea was more fantasy than reality. Oh well, tomorrow we will be in Kauai and the sun may come out to play with us there.
