Byo-do Temple, Chinaman’s Hat, North Shore Dole Plantation

We did and saw a lot of stuff today. Hopefully, I’ll get to most of it. We started with breakfast at Sonny’s local grind, which I had seen some good reviews for on one of the sites. Unfortunately, like most of this area and pretty much all of Honolulu, parking was very scarce. So at first, I parked at a 7-Eleven around the corner from the restaurant, but Deb noticed as we were walking away from the car that there was a big sign that said tow-away zone. So I got in line to order, because apparently a lot of other people saw the same great reviews that I did, and Deb went back to the car to move it. One nice thing about Sonny’s being so packed was that we had time to drive her on the block and find some public parking before our order was ready. The food was pretty good. I wouldn’t say great, but it was good, and the service was really nice. We then started sightseeing at the Byodo-In temple and followed our Guidealong app circle tour from there. The temple is actually a recreation of a Buddhist temple in Japan, and it was pretty cool to cop. We got to ring a giant bell and we saw a big statue of Buddha in the temple part itself. What was kind of interesting is even though this wasn’t the actual temple, we still had to take our shoes off to go inside. After the temple, we followed the guide along app circle tour of Oahu. This tour took us around the north part of the island where we stopped at a few places. One of these was a farmers outlet type of place, where they had all kinds of different macadamia nut flavors and some fresh pineapple and other fruits. They also had chickens running all over the place. Seems like chickens in Hawaii are like pigeons in Chicago, they’re everywhere. We got some fresh pineapple to eat on the road. We also stopped at a neat state park right on the northern point of the island and watch the surf for a little while. They have a lot of great beaches on the North Shore, including Sunset Beach and the Bonzai Pipeline which are world famous for surfing. At both of these places, we got out and watched the surfing, but they are also both really packed so we didn’t stay too long. On our way back to Waikiki we also stopped at Dole Plantation and we tried the Dole Whip. This is basically pineapple flavored sherbet, so it was pretty good, but not the greatest thing I’ve ever had. Also,Dole Plantation has a serious Wisconsin Dells vibe to it. for the record, that is not a good thing. After getting back to Waikiki, we met Kendal, his wife, and son at a restaurant called the Side St., Inn. The restaurant was really hard to find, for some reason it’s not lit up at all on the outside and then even after you find it you have to drive around a little bit to see where you can valet park underneath the building. But the food was good, it was great to see Kendal again, and really nice to meet his wife and young son. That was enough for the day so we headed back to our hotel and to our beds.