We have arrived in Honolulu so that Sandy can present in a poster session at SAA 2013. The flight left Wednesday afternoon and arrived just after sunset on Oahu. We caught a cab from the airport to the Maile Sky Court hotel in Waikiki, about a half mile from the Convention Center.

Our room has a king sized bed and a small kitchen. We've got wired ethernet in the room. There is WiFi in the lobby but I could not get it to work. We're on the 39th floor of the tower.

All is well except that I think that I locked Inti, our cat, into Sandy's office when we left. Charlie is going to rescue her tomorrow evening.

This is the view from our hotel which faces generally southeast down Waikiki. The beach is off to the right. The street right below us is Kuhio, one of two streets running down the length of Waikiki.

This is the tower from below. We are five floors below the top. Our view is pretty good from there.

The Hawaiian equivalent to a 7-11 Store is the ABC Store. There appears to be a local ordinance that requires that there be two ABC stores on every block. There is a regular market a few blocks away.

This is Waikiki State Beach Park. Much of the other beach is owned by various hotels. This spot is about a mile from out hotel. We strolled around and bought some food, which is really expensive here. We don't want to eat out too much, not so much for the expense, but we are both on diets and it is harder to control what we eat in restaurants.

Sandy is going to spend the afternoon at the convention center. I am probably going to get on the bus and find my way around. There is a $25 4 day bus ticket available at the ABC Store across the street. "The Bus" is the name of the bus line which runs pretty much all around the island.

After lunch in the room, Sandy and I left, but she walked to the convention center and I went the other way to buy a 4 day bus ticket and ride to the Ala Moana Mall. Actually those two places are "next" to one another, but both are quite large and there is a pretty good walk to get between them. I really wanted to test the bus system, which basically worked, but I messed up. On the way back, I got off at the wrong bus stop and wandered around a bit finding my way again and then finding the hotel.

Charlie called and he said that Inti was running around loose in the house so I didn't lock her in.... whew.

Sandy spent a couple of hours at the SAA convention this morning. I had an errand to run to make some labels for two of the four posters that the authors had not added. I made them at a pack and ship place several blocks away.

When Sandy got back at about 1100, we walked toward the beach to the US Army Museum. The museum occupies a very prime piece of real estate right on the beach. I wondered how it could be there. There were some tanks parked outside.

Were inside for awhile when I figured it out. The building was very heavily constructed out of concrete with heavy doors and grates to various rooms. It was a shore battery that held 2 14" rifled guns on the roof. This thing was designed to take shelling.

As was common for heavy shore batteries, the "rifles" were retractible. This is a model of the rifle in the extended position so that it could shoot over the top of the battery. The recoil from the shot would retract the gun to roof level so that it was protected from low angle incoming rounds and it could be reloaded.

This is a model of the battery with the gun raised into firing position. The original guns are gone now, cut up for scrap. However, the monsters weighed 332 tons each.

After the shot, a 14" shell which probably weighed a ton, the gun retracted behind the wall and an earthen barrier to protect it from incoming shells. As far as I can tell, it never fired a shot in anger.

The exhibits were organized in chronological order starting from warfare between the Hawaiian's themselves, to the arrival of the US that eventually resulted in annexation, WW II, Korea and Viet Nam.

After touring the museum, we went back to the hotel but we couldn't get to our room because the elevators were not working. So we walked down the street for several blocks and got lunch at the Seaside Bar and Grill. Sandy had a Mai Tai and that pretty much did her in. When we got back to the hotel, Sandy crashed.

>Sandy is at the conference most of the day so I took the bus to the other end of Waikiki to the Honolulu Zoo. The zoo sits on 42 acres, but a lot of it is open parkland. There were not as many exhibits as I expected, I made it all through the place, stopping at every exhibit, in about an hour. I shot mostly video while I was there, and I only took stills when the lighting was good and there were no cages or glass that obscured the view of the residents.

This is a Nile Monitor lizard. This is one of the few reptiles I could photograph without shooting through glass or a cage.

The meerkat exhibit as also visible over a glass barrier. There were a bunch of them running around, but none of them were on alert.

The komodo dragon was in a glassed in enclosure, but I had to get a picture just because he was so big.

The whole trip over to the zoo on the bus and back took only 2 hours. At lunchtime, I walked to a Subway a few blocks away and got a sandwich, half was lunch, half will be dinner. Eating out is very expensive and hard on the waistline so I am trying not to blow the budget or my diet.

Sandy came back at about 1400, she was done with a very successful poster session but she was spent. She had 4 posters delivered to her just after we got here. One of the posters was her's covering the mapping work she did for a UC Fullerton professor concerning the boundaries of the Tarascan empire in Mexico. The Tarascans were one of the few Mexican tribes not conquered by the Aztecs, however they did succombe to Cortez. What she didn't know that the "presenters" of the other three posters didn't show up for various reasons and she had to study and "present" their work too even though she hadn't seen it before.

We're both ready to go home, but our red-eye doesn't leave until about 2200 tomorrow. We'll probably stay in our room until check out time at noon and then move down to the lobby, which has some comfortable chairs, to hang out until we decide to take The Bus over to the airport sometime after dinner. There are two lines that run right by the hotel that go to the airport. I have the 4 day bus pass (which I didn't use enough to actually pay for itself) and Sandy can pay a $2.50 fare for the ride to the airport. That beats a $29 cab ride. We'll spend the rest of the time until the flight leaves in an airport waiting room

Today is a slow day with nothing on the agenda but getting home. Our flight doesn't leave until 2230 and we have 10 hours to go yet. Checkout time is noon. Our plan is to hang out in the very nice open lobby of the hotel after we check out except when we are getting lunch and dinner. Sometime after dinner, we will get on the #19 bus and head to Honolulu airport, check in, clear security, and then wait in a gate lounge until we board our flight. We'll get in at about 0700 Monday, find the car in the long term parking lot and drive home. Then Sandy turns around and goes to class. I will probably just crash.

The return trip went according to plan, but I didn't sleep at all last night. It was cool and windy when we arrived, a stark contrast to Honolulu. Inti was clearly ticked at us, but she'll get over it.