A Day in Hawaii: The Story

9-11 November 1984

No one in their right mind goes to Hawaii for just one day.  Right?  Wrong!  We did!!!  OK, so with travel time it was more like a weekend trip, but we had just one day for sightseeing on Oahu, the third largest island of the 50th State of the US.  The total cost for the two of us was $20 for airfare (and that was actually for the boxed lunch we were served on the return trip to Utah), and two nights at a reasonably-priced, off-Waikiki hotel — one of the Outrigger properties, I think.

Google Maps image showing the places we visited on Oahu.
[click the map for a larger version]

So, how did this trip happen?  We heard that the Utah Air National Guard was running fairly regular training missions to Hawaii.  As long as there was space available (Space A), members of the military and their dependents could go along.  Why not, we said to ourselves, and signed up.

We flew a KC-135 air refueling tanker — most definitely not a passenger plane, that’s for sure.  Bring to mind those war movies where paratroopers are sitting in webbed-seats along the fuselage and you’ll get a picture of how we flew to Hawaii.  Yup.  There we were, in our not-so-comfortable web seats for a rather lengthy trans-Pacific flight, crates of cargo in the middle of the aircraft, no portholes that I can recall, and freezing cold to boot.  Did we care?  No; we were on our way to a warm, tropical island.

We took off from Salt Lake City around 4-5p on a Friday, made a stop in Arizona to drop off some golfers (I’m sure there was an otherwise legit reason for the stop), and landed in Honolulu shortly before 11:00p.  (Bear in mind that there’s a 3-hour time difference between Utah and Hawaii.)  The hot, humid night air was a welcome relief after the cold temps we’d endured during the flight.  Inside the terminal, we were greeted with leis — welcome to paradise.  Picking up our rental car, we drove straight to our hotel.  Rather exhausted, we fell into bed for a restful night’s sleep.

The next day, we found a place to have breakfast, drove over to Diamond Head to check out the views, then went to Pearl Harbor to visit the USS Arizona Memorial.  We capped off the day with a sunset dinner cruise.  The following morning, we walked around downtown Honolulu for a bit before going to the airport for our return flight to Utah.  Same aircraft; same conditions.  But hey, who cares.  Our little adventure left us with memories that have lasted a lifetime.

Here are a few photos from our drive up to the Diamond Head Lighthouse.

And here's a photograph from the sunset dinner cruise; the colors were so badly deteriorated that I kept just the one that shows Diamond Head in the distance and converted it to B&W.  The streak in the photo … well that was the beautiful rainbow that graced our cruise.