This afternoon Nina and I had our weekly assignment at the Polynesian Cultural Center. This week we were taking tickets at the Aloha Luau, the largest of the luau venues at the Center. As usual, 90% of the luau guests arrived between 4:20 and 5:00pm and the other 10% didn’t get there until well after 6pm when the show was almost over. My Scotch brain can’t wrap my head around paying all that money for a luau and either showing up an hour and a half late or leaving an hour before the show is finished!

After we finished our assignments we walked over to the Prime Dining venue and had dinner. After dinner we walked out to the parking lot to go home. I took several pictures on the way and have put six of them in this blog entry. The first one is of the big sign when leaving the area where the Polynesian Island Displays are located (and where you need a ticket) to go into the new Hukilau Marketplace, where no ticket is needed and there are plenty of opportunities to spend money.

Just past the sign are three banana trees, each with one or more bunches of green bananas. They are great tourist attractions. Many guests take pictures looking like they are holding the bunch of bananas up, or like they are picking a banana. In about a week these will be ripe enough to take down and eat. Right now they’re in the stage where they are usually harvested, put in big plastic bags, and shipped to the US for further processing, then shipped to the store where they are almost ripe when they arrive.

The Pacific Theater is where the night show is put on. It’s a large venue and enclosed on three sides, the sides towards the shore and where the winds come from, thus sheltering the guests from the trade winds and any associated rain. There are cell phone antennas on top of the theater and a week ago the maintenance people put up the antennas for the BYU-Hawaii amateur radio club repeater. They are supposed to be pulling the coax cable for antennas this week into the room where the repeater will be located. As soon as that is done we will be able to install the ham radio repeater and get it back up on the air. That’ll be a welcome capability here on the north shore.

We had a beautiful sunset this evening with fluffy white clouds scattered across the sky offsetting the royal palm trees. I’m not sure it’s possible to have enough sunrise and sunset pictures from Hawaii. It seems that just about all of them are distinctively beautiful and picture worthy.

Nina is particularly fond of sunrise and sunset pictures and regularly posts these pictures on her Facebook page. They always get a lot of “likes”.

These little collapsable wagons are just about everywhere these days as children / stuff haulers. There are almost as many wagons now at the PCC as there are strollers, and there are a LOT of strollers (and a corresponding number of very tired children at the end of the day). This particular wagon was well loaded with children! There was definitely no space for anything else in the wagon. The wagon with the children was also a very popular photographic subject for the hundreds of Asian tourists at the PCC tonight.

The sun was just right on the exit signs as we were leaving the PCC to get into our car. We’d had a long, busy day and were right ready to go home! When we got home, our neighbors across the driveway were sitting outside in front of their garage in lawn chairs, so we pulled out a couple of chairs and visited with them for a while. We were having another lovely evening with a nice, cooling breeze. We had a delightful conversation as we unwound for the day. Now, that this blog post done, it’s time to go to bed! Tomorrow is another day at the Visitors’ Center followed by tram / bus coordination tomorrow evening. In between we’ll be meeting our new Hawaii Honolulu Mission President, President Becker, who is nearing the end of a hectic tour around the mission meeting all of the missionaries. We’ll be at the Visitors’ Center from 9am to 1:15pm, then to Kahuku (a neighboring town) along with several sister missionaries from 1:30 to 3:30pm to meet with President Becker. That’ll be followed by tram / bus coordination from 6-7pm. Then back home for dinner and falling into bed!

Ta ta for now!