Pearl Harbor

My mother freaked that G and I wanted to go to Pearl Harbor the day of our wedding. Um mom, the wedding's not til 5pm. I'm not going to sit in my room all day twiddling my thumbs waiting for 5pm. Yeah... no.

So G, my parents, my brother, my sister in law, and the nephew all met up at Pearl Harbor early Wednesday morning. They tell you get to the Arizona Memorial early so you can get a time. Only so many people can fit on the memorial and they take you out there for 15 minutes at a time.

we were there by 8am. The line wrapped around the building. We got a ferry boat time of 930am. So, we had about an hour to kill on the grounds. We took pictures, bummed in the museum, toured the gift shop. My brother headed over to one of the submarines to check it out. Submarine with lots of people felt like claustrophobia central to me. So, I passed.

Before we boarded the ferry, they showed us a twenty minute video on the history of the attack on Pearl Harbor. Not much I didn't already know, but still good.

We're still laughing about how bad the Navy girl was who piloted our ferry. she couldn't dock our ferry boat to save her life. (she had to have been learning because the other Navy guy on the ferry was chuckling under his breath).

The Arizona Memorial didn't effect me as much as it should have. Maybe I was distracted by everything else that was going to happen that day. Maybe it's too far in the past for me to really relate to. Lots of people were putting leis in the water , or around the posts with the lists of names of soldier who died. G and I spent a lot of time looking at the schematics of the ship. I also couldn't believe that oil was still bubbling up out of the ship 60 years later. That just seemed weird to me. You'd think all the oil would be gone by now.



One of the park rangers gave us an extra detailed talk about the ship. He spotted me in my UT National Champions shirt.. and told us that since he won a bunch of money on the game from his USC loving boss.. he'd give us an extra twenty minutes on the memorial if we wanted a private tour. SURE! how many people get to do that ? That.. and he was probably bored. But, he was a really nice guy and explained to us exactly why Arizona sank as fast as it did. HUGE battleship.. sank in like seven minutes.

After our tour, we headed over to the USS Missouri to tour the battleship. Very cool to see, climb on things, etc. Also need to think that my Uncle Dick used to work on one of these things.


After lunch at the snack area near the Missouri it was time to head back to the hotel to get ready. WEDDING TIME !!