Day 1 Tuesday 28 October

Our good friend & neighbour Anji gave us a lift into Civic so that we could catch the Murray’s bus to Sydney Airport. The bus trip to Sydney was comfortable & uneventful, very pleasant to sit back & let someone else do the driving. We arrived in Sydney at 12.15 with plenty of time for our flight to Hawaii at 5.55pm.

Our flight to Hawaii was smooth with 9 ½ hours flying, then bag pick up & customs checks, we walked out into the Honolulu warmth & humidity before we left Australia, it was 9am, Tuesday 28 October. We decided to get a rental car as our apartment in Waikiki was not available until 3pm. After a bit of uncertainty we found the shuttle bus to the rental car place & we rented a medium size Chrysler with a GPS navigation aid.

We decided to drive through the middle of the island of Oahu to the north shore & took a little while to get used to driving on the right side of the road in a left-hand-drive car, my very first time at this sort of thing & it was a little daunting. We stopped when we reached the north coast & had breakfast at a very eclectic health food shack called the “Beet Box”, full of young surfer types having healthy foods. It was very ramshackle (in Australia the building would have been condemned as unfit for use & pulled down) & friendly, the breakfast menu was different & interesting, but the food was very tasty (Venetia would have been proud of us eating & drinking vegetarian health food such as wheat grass juice etc.) We continued on our way east across the north shore driving close to the sea & stopped at the famous Waimea Bay to look at the surf – flat as a pancake – zero waves. Next was Sunset Beach where they were holding a surfing contest, they had to cancel the day for lack of waves. We continued on & stopped at a “Shrimp Shack” on the side of the road for lunch. The fresh farmed prawns were delicious & we ate lunch under the shade shelter they had set up. It was very popular with lots of tourist buses stopping there for lunch as well.

The drive down the east coast of Oahu was slow & scenic, next to the sea most of the time with very few places to pull off. The mountain ranges are certainly very rugged & beautiful with curtains of clouds continually hugging them. We eventually found our way to Waikiki & lucked it in finding the apartment block “Waikiki Marina” with our apartment on the 37^th floor with magnificent views of the ocean & the famous Waikiki surf break full of surfers. Our apartment block is on the western end of Waikiki, the quiet end, close to the Ala Moana canal & the Ala Moana shopping plaza. After settling in we walked a few hundred metres to the Ala Moana plaza & wandered around this massive shopping complex, full of high end shops like Gucci, Fendi, Rolex, Cartier, etc. We ended up having dinner at the Bubba Gump Shrimp Restaurant, all decked out in Forrest Gump (the movie) memorabilia with a souvenir shop there right next door. After a great dinner back to our apartment (we phoned James & he was impressed with our choice of restaurant, talked to Monica & she & family are well too) with glorious views & early bed.

I found out my younger brother Barry died of cancer today, we were both diagnosed with cancer around the same time but his cancer was more advanced than mine & proved to be inoperable. We both went through the hell of chemotherapy together & I last visited him around 2 weeks ago, he was in a bad way with a morphine pump assisting him with the pain. It is a blessing he is not suffering any further, but it still hurt a lot. It could so easily have been me as well. It’s also sad that I couldn’t be there for my family & provide some comfort for my parents.