Honolulu 1990

In my continuing effort to bore the crap out of anybody reading this stuff, here is an account of a trip that we took in June of 1990 to Hawaii for my nephew Chris' wedding. In typical fashion I started out in great detail and never finished. This gets you as far as the first night in the Waikiki hotel. I was apparently in love with ellipses at the time.

Wednesday, June 13 Getting ready for an afternoon flight. Took Mandy to the pet motel and gassed up the truck. Decided to take pickup to airport, cramped but better than leaving the van there to get dented or giving a fortune to a cab driver. Had a free parking coupon from Ask Mr. Foster...

Everybody ready to go, four suitcases, two backpacks, Susan's carryon bag, a big straw purse and a camera bag. A bit cumbersome but handleable. The fourth suitcase was necessitated by decision to take: baseball gloves and hats; smashball paddles; frisbee; cd player and cds...

Southwest Airlines to LA. Terminal 1, what a relic. Beers and pops (outside) while waiting for the plane. Festival seating, but they let you on in the order you got there pretty much. Plane not full...

LAX! Got the bags with no hassle, expected to see a phone with the name of our (obscure) rental car company on it. No luck. They weren't listed in the phone book. A menacing looking skycap kept hanging around trying help. Finally I found a phone number on the Ask Mr. Foster itinerary. They will be there in 5 minutes. Go out to the second curb where the sign says (unintelligible)...

We find what appears to be that curb. The nice man directing the mob at that curb asked us what we were waiting for and we told him. He responded that yes, they would stop there. Next thing we see is our van, zooming past to stop about a city block down. We grab up everything and run. I am at the head of the pack with John close behind. He steps off the curb and nearly gets run over. As we close in on the van the S.O.B. takes off again. I continue the chase and finally reach him, probably 1/8th of a mile from our beginning point. I get on and determine that the guy can barely speak English. "I stop there I ticket" He closes the door and starts to leave as Susan tries to board. Mike had fallen down at least once...

Welcome to Los Angeles...

We get to the car rental and get in our Chevy Nova (the Japanese kind). The steering pulls to the right and the wheel goes thumpa-thumpa-thumpa when you move. This outfit was known nationally as Airways Car Rental but was known locally as Pacific. Ask Mr. Foster was responsible but I did ask for a cheap rental and the price was right ($23.50). I understand why they change the name...

The hotel was the Airport Century Inn, midway between LAX and the 405 on Century Boulevard. This was a good deal, $56, clean, with a nice pool, which we didn't use, and a Denny's, which we did...

After an early meal at Denny's we headed out for Anaheim, leaving around 5:15 for a 7:35 game. Making that game on time soon became a question. The 405 was nearly gridlocked. You'd think, with all of their freeways, that getting from the 405 (San Diego Freeway) over to the 5 (Santa Ana Freeway), which is where the Stadium is and which roughly parallels the 405 in this area would be fairly straightforward. It wasn't. Beside from the fact that you thought yourself doing pretty well to be going 15 mph on the damn thing, you really had to take a non-freeway route (Redondo Beach Blvd.) to get over to the road you needed to take to the 5 (91-Artesia Freeway) or go south to the 10 (Harbor Freeway) and then back north to the 91. Neither way seemed to promising, we chose to stay on 405 to the 10 and the ballgame seemed hours away although it was already past 6:00. When we finally got on the 91, we found a diamond lane, determined that we qualified, and cruised for burgers (or rather thumpa-thumpa-thumpaed for them). The big question became whether or not the 5 would be paralyzed like the 405. It wasn't, and we found ourselves in the parking lot at the Big A with plenty of time to spare...

"It never rains in Southern California," right? It's even rumored (not true) that they don't own a tarp at Anaheim Stadium. This night was a weird one. It sprinkled during the early innings. It was so cold that I (who had said that I would be just fine in a tee-shirt) had to buy a long sleeved Angels shirt in the gift shop. The seats were awful. They were what would be called loge seats at ASU, but they were in deep left field just inside of foul territory. For having been purchased in mid April for a game that turned out to be lightly attended, this was pretty bad. I am going to have to figure out how to do this better the next time. The Angels were awful too. They had been hot and the Royals had not. They had their ace, Jim Abbott (the guy with one hand), on the mound. The Royals sent out Mark Gubicza, no slouch himself, but he left after the first inning with some sort of muscle pull. When Abbott finally left he had given up 7 runs and was ultimately responsible for a couple more. He walked in a run at one point. We got the boys some hot chocolate and left after the 7th inning stretch. The final score, which we heard on the radio, was 11-4...

We got to the hotel with no hassle, other than an abortive stop for sodas at an AM-PM Mini Mart on Century Blvd., which was ended by an aggressive pan handler who made me decide to not get out of the car...

We watched David Letterman and went to sleep...

Thursday, June 14 We had thoughts of going to the Griffith Observatory and Planetarium, but it turned out that it didn't open until noon. After breakfast at Denny's we decided to go on the NBC Studio Tour. It wasn't expensive ($20 for the four of us) and was 75 minutes long. So there we were thumpaing north on the 405, not much better in the morning after rush hour...

NBC, as we all know, is in Burbank, a few miles northeast of Universal Studios, on the Ventura Freeway. Susan read the beginning of the Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe aloud as we approached. We bought the tickets and were informed of a 40 minute wait prior to our group leaving. I think it would have been a shorter wait if we'd gotten there a few minutes earlier. The tour was great. This is a real studio, not an amusement park like Universal. We saw makeup (Susan recognized some soap opera queen), costume, set construction (we saw the set from Wings, the new sitcom from the makers of Cheers), the WNBC news studio. The best part, of course, was the studio where the Tonight Show is taped. There was also some demonstration stuff, a studio where they pointed cameras at the audience and showed how they did fades, splitscreens, etc. We all got on camera a bunch. Later on they took us in a room where they asked for volunteers. They picked me because I had a blue shirt on. They had me stand in front of a blue background and then superimposed some image on the wall (and my shirt). This is the technique they use for weather reports, etc. Then John got to put on a Superman cape and appear to fly over the Hollywood Hills, swim with dolphins, etc. We all enjoyed this tour a lot and can recommend it...

Back on the freeway, heading for lunch at Venice Beach. Seemed worth a look, anyway. More C.S. Lewis on the way...

Venice is pretty grubby. Lots of tourists. There were some characters as advertised but mostly tourists. Seems like a nice enough beach. Ate hotdogs and later some frozen yoghurt. Found a reasonable comic book store...

We decided to avoid the 405 and drive straight north to the airport. This got us to the airport nearly an hour before we expected. The rental car place decided to only charge us for one day although they had earlier threatened two. I told them about the condition of the car and they seemed real concerned...

We were to meet Pat and Suzanne at the airport. about 6:00. I called him when we got there (5:05) and he hadn't left yet. The plane wasn't to leave until 7:30 so it was boredom time. The kids and Susan read, I walked around a bit. I had (still have as of this writing) to read this software metrics book for work. It's awful. Moved to the Domino's/bar at 6:00 to catch the beginning of the Pistons/Trailblazers game. This was to be the last game but we didn't know that and were hoping for a Portland win so that we could see the final game on Sunday in Honolulu. Pat and Suzanne showed up about 6:20. Not nearly enough time to visit, but so it goes. Pat has stopped drinking even near beer. We boarded about 7:00...

DC-10, two pair of outside seats together. Headphones around, even though the movie was Steel Magnolias, which was likely to entertain only Susan. The kids fell asleep shortly after dinner. We were due in at 10:00, which was 1:00 a.m. LA time. I managed to knock off a chapter in that awful book. Steel Magnolias was awful, and I was the only one to stay awake all of the way through it. (Actually I think I dozed once for about 15 minutes but didn't miss a thing.) We got in, got our bags and rental car with minimal problems considering how much of a madhouse the baggage claim area was. Short hop in an AVIS mini-bus and we were in our brand new (4 miles on the odometer) Olds Calais looking at maps...

It was around 11:00 when we hit Waikiki, which is a very busy place, even at that hour on a Thursday. When we got in our room on the 35th floor of the Outrigger Prince Kuhio, I opened the door to our lanai and saw... the mountains. I had specifically been promised an ocean view. The bellman arrived with our bags and I informed him of the problem. All they could move us to was a room with a king size bed instead of to doubles. They would have to bring in two rollaways. We moved an spent the night with wall to wall bed. The room was very nice with a lot of extra touches like a hairdryer, a stocked refrigerator, a makeup mirror, bathrobes, etc. The top three floors cost $20 extra and came with such amenities along with continental breakfast. I reasoned that it was worth it and I'm glad I did. We caught part of the Johnny Carson show that we had watch them getting ready for many hours earlier and went to sleep...

At this point I should explain the Hawaiian language, or what I understand of it. There are a few words that are used universally. You are familiar with aloha. Another, that we first heard from the flight attendant on the way there, was mahalo, which appears to mean thank you. It's used a whole lot. What I don't know is where it is a thing done for/with tourists or actually used by everyone, i.e. when one Anglo businessman holds the elevator door far another, does the second guy really say mahalo? Another word is lanai, which I used earlier and means balcony. Significant to directions are makai, which means towards the ocean and mauku which means towards the mountains. That was the problem with our room, we were supposed to be makai but were mauku...