Maybe in Oz

We took a drive around Oahu one day to explore the coastline and get out of the chaos of the city.  The East coast was much more pleasant - less people and lots of beautiful scenery.  The area past Makaou'u point was our first stop as the rocks were beaconing us to go climb around on them. Next we stopped at the Byodo-In Temple.  This temple was in the back of the Valley of the Temples Memorial Park, so we had to pass through all of these different cultural cemeteries to get there.  The temple was gorgeous and well worth the stop.  It was built as a smaller replica of one in Japan with the perfect mountain backdrop behind it.  The grounds were beautiful and we enjoyed seeing the Australian black swans that were brought to the temple as a gift.  Farther along the East Coast we stopped for lunch and to check out the view of the Chinaman's Hat. The North side was a bit busier again, but we decided to stop near Shark's Bay to have a spl

The only way to fly to Hawaii from Australia is through Oahu, so when we first decided to go to Kauai we figured we should stop in Oahu for a few days as well.  At the top of the list was seeing Pearl Harbor, and fortunately by chance it had just reopened a couple weeks earlier after being closed for reconstruction for many months.  The Diamond Head hike was also one of those things I figured we should do. Well, Diamond Head was horrible.  The parking lot is small so we parked at a nearby park and walked in which was fine.  The point was getting some exercise so that helped us get more in.  But the trail was completely packed with all sorts of oblivious people.  It wasn't a super difficult or long walk, which meant all different sorts of people were out there.  The problem with that it we all had to converge into narrow stair cases in a couple points which meant we spent more time waiting in line on the hike than actually hiking.  And then once we got to the top the lookout was