Saturday Jan 31, 2026
Hi All! The words of the day today were somber, moving, powerful, emotional, and respectful. All from our visit to Pearl Harbor but more on that later.
Today we are docked in Honolulu, Hawaii on the island of Oahu. And we’ll be here overnight. It is the capital and most populous city in the US State of Hawaii. And it has almost 3 million visitors per year.
Our tour today was called “Pearl Harbor and City Highlights”. We started with a bus ride to the Pearl Harbor Historic Site. There are many different museums there to walk thru and movies to watch but the most powerful of all was visiting the USS Arizona Memorial.
The Memorial is a rectangular shaped white building with 21 openings in it (signifying a 21 gun salute) that sits over top of the sunken USS Arizona battle ship. They shared so much of the history both leading up to and occurring on Dec 7, 1941, the day that will live in infamy. On that day the USS Arizona and many other battle ships in Pearl Harbor were attacked by the Japanese.
There were 1,177 soldiers that died on the Arizona that day with almost 900 still resting in the water below the Memorial. Of those that died, there were 38 sets of brothers, a father and son and a 16 year old boy that was the youngest. Miraculously there were 300 that survived.
Of the 300 that survived, many of them want their ashes interned at the Arizona Memorial to be with their brothers who in some cases died in their arms. The last crew member of the Arizona passed away in April 2024 and was interned there in Dec 2024. When interned there, they place the urn with their ashes into gun turret # 4.
After our visit to the Memorial, we rode to Nu’ Uana Pali Lookout. We saw some amazing views down on to Honolulu as well as the surrounding mountain range and the Diamond Head Crater. We then road thru the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific (also known as Punchbowl Cemetery) which has over 61,000 graves.
We then took a panoramic drive thru downtown Honolulu. After the tour we got back on the ship and had lunch. After lunch we grabbed an Uber and went to Whole Foods. No, not for food! We got plenty of that on this ship!
We had forgotten to bring a couple items and ordered them from Amazon and had it delivered to the Whole Foods Amazon Locker for pickup. Funny thing was, our Uber driver graduated from the University of Pittsburgh where I got my MBA. Small world!
Since we had been gone all day we decided to just chill for the night, order room service and watch a movie. Kind of like my family back in North Carolina probably did tonight since they got over 10 inches of snow! So we did this in honor of them! Hope everyone had a great Saturday!
The Wandering Italian 