...Yadda yadda yadda...more than we love the food in Honolulu, we LOVE the climate. How do you beat a constant 72 degrees AVERAGE in winter?? I still don't have any real photos to post because we spent the entire friggin' day looking for this computer battery charger/AC-adaptor that we were almost willing to admit didn't exist in this dimension. Thank goodness for Radio Shack.

It's almost midnight and the sliders are open to our lanai (balcony). Wood panels enclose the opening and we can adjust our privacy on each of the four panels by sliding the louvers up or down. We hear the beat of the waves on Waikiki Beach and the weird silence of everything else. Not so, from about 9AM to 9PM when traditional Hawaiian Island music wafts up the invisible corridors of the prevailing breezes to floors 8, 12, 15, etc. Winter hands, cracked and nearly bleeding a couple days ago, are saying thank you to the warmth and humidity. They look ten years younger. Ok, Doobie, you ALWAYS look at LEAST ten years younger in the perpetually-embalming climate of Fort Myers! Lucky you!

My next door neighbor Amy D. called today to tell us that there's a snowstorm in Fogelsville. And "by the way, did you mean to leave the window open on your second floor? It's open a couple of inches." Oh crap. Guess we'll be looking at higher than normal heating bills for February. Maybe we'll be shovelling snow out of Paige's bedroom when we get home!

Today, I suggested, mostly tongue-in-cheek, to Larry that we go on a dinner cruise that takes us offshore around Waikiki and Diamond Head. Lar said, "Ok, I'll rent the rowboat, you get the peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, and we'll find a joint to sell us a six-pack of beer." More yadda....we ended up at The Bistro, one of Honolulu's finest. This man knows how to do dinner....and lunch....and breakfast!


Our hotel, Halekulani, means "house befitting heaven" in the Hawaiian language. Check it out at www.halekulani.com. The pool, pictured above from our lanai, is made up of over a million individual 1-inch by 1-inch ceramic tiles with an orchid pictured in the middle of it. It's a huge pool, and maybe you can get the perspective by the person on the right side in the pool. The beach here at Halekulani is practically non-existent. The sea has eroded the beach so much that they erected a sea wall and built a sandy area they call the "sand box" (seen just at the top of the above picture) for anyone wanting to say, literally, they were on the beach at Waikiki.

Oh, by the way, one thing about this Pro Bowl stuff...our hotel is swarming with people either going to or participating in the Pro Bowl. Larry and I are NOT football people (just give us March Madness with college basketball! Go Villanova!) but we did get up close to Dick Vermeil, former coach of the Philadelphia Eagles. We were headed out of the hotel. He was headed in. In my astonishment, I just dropped my jaw and stared. How cool, eh? Such a country bumpkin! Missed that photo op!

More tomorrow on the North Shore of Oahu...