Before I get into the details, a couple of important things to remember for people visiting in the future. The visit to the Battleship Arizona Memorial is free but has a limited number of tickets. Reservations can be made in advance (a long ways in advance!). The other three exhibits, the USS Bowfin, the Battleship Missouri, and the Pacific Aviation Museum, require tickets which can be purchased individually or as a group. These three don’t seem to have visitor quotas.
We didn’t think about getting a reservation until a couple of days before going and all advance reservations were taken for that day as well as all the rest of the days in March. The Park Service releases 1,300 tickets every day at 7:00 am in the morning. We were there at 7am and got in line. We were able to get tickets to the 8:00am tour to the Arizona. By 8am the tickets were gone for the entire day. According to the website, everyone going on the tour has to be there to get the tickets, however no one checked to see if we were all there when I asked for four tickets.
The Battleship Arizona Memorial:
First we attended a twenty-minute video presentation in the theater. Then boarded a ferry boat run by the US Navy to go out to the Memorial. Visited the memorial, reboarded the ferry boat, and returned to shore. The entire process takes at least an hour, including the video, and that’s actually hurrying.
The memorial itself is a large building built on top of the sunken battleship with open areas to look down onto the wreck. The crowd was quite subdued and very respectful while we were there and the tour we were on had a number of foreigners, including quite a few Japanese tourists. We rented audio tour headsets, which I would recommend as there is a lot to see both in the memorial itself as well as on shore. The tour is narrated by Jamie Lee Curtis, Tony Curtis’s daughter as well as a well-known actress in her own right. She gave a brilliant commentary. On shore are a couple of souvenir shops and snack bars as well as a number of other static exhibits. The audio tour also covers all of the static exhibits.
The USS Bowfin:
The submarine was a delightful visit and the tour goes all the way through the much-decorated submarine. The ticket price included audio headsets and I highly recommend getting the headsets and using them. The tour was not only very entertaining, but very educational as well. One thing that stood out to me from the tour was the importance of spying and intelligence on the enemy. One example had to do with depth charges. Intelligence had ascertained that the Japanese depth charges (unlike the German version) had a maximum depth of 300 feet. So, to avoid a problem all the sub had to do was get down to 400 feet or lower (and hopefully the ocean bottom was below that depth).
This battleship was the last of the big battleships commissioned by the US Navy and was the site of the unconditional Japanese surrender that ended World War II. The “Mighty Mo” represents the end of World War II while the Battleship Arizona was the beginning of the war. They’re fitting bookends! It’s moored on Ford Island, an active naval base. To get there one has to take a shuttle bus (part of the ticket price). To say the battleship is huge is a massive understatement. There are audio tour machines available but we elected not to do that as there were also guided tours. We started the guided tour and bailed out after about 15 minutes as the guide was too much into himself and how he knew all this stuff that we wouldn’t know and not enough into doing the actual tour. The walkthrough can be long or short. I opted for the long tour, Nina opted for a shorter tour. There is a lot of signage on the tour explaining the various parts of the ship. Unfortunately for us, there was some kind of a private event being held on the so-called “surrender deck” and we weren’t able to go there.
The Pacific Aviation Museum:
I was very pleasantly surprised at this museum and the number and type of aircraft on display. The museum is in two hangers with static displays between the two hangers. There is an active renovation/restoration facility at the back of the second, larger hanger which is also open to walk around. One of the aircraft being restored was a B-17 bomber pulled out of a swamp in the south Pacific after being in the swamp for almost 50 years. Another restoration project was the front end of a B-52 bomber including the flight deck and the countermeasures deck. By the time we got to this museum some of our party were tired of walking so they stayed in the cafeteria while allowing me the time to walk through the entire exhibit. I would like to go back again.
All in All it was a very nice, long day. Nina and I left Laie at 4am, picked Jared and Tania up at their hotel in Waikiki about 6:15, and then drove over to the memorial park to arrive right a 7am. We got back to the parking lot on the shuttle bus from Ford Island (standing room only, not a great ending for very tired feet) right at 4pm. It is possible to do different parts of the tour on different days. For instance, do the Arizona Memorial and the USS Bowfin on one day, then come back on another day to take the shuttle over to Ford Island for the Battleship Missouri and the Pacific Aviation Museum. All four sites are well worth the visit!
Ta ta for now!