Duke's on Sunday

Through the magic of the International Date Line, I find myself blogging again on Sunday, despite having flown a great long way overnight. I mean, we left Bali at 10:30 on Sunday night, and arrived in Honolulu at 5:40 on Sunday afternoon. Ah, well.

And as so often happens to me as I'm on a tropical island, I have a Jimmy Buffett tune bouncing through my brain. Entirely appropriate this time, as the tune in my head is "Duke's on Sunday," a tribute to the very beach we just walked past on our way to and from dinner. Duke's is named for Duke Kahanamoku, the Olympic gold-medal swimmer best known as the man who popularized surfing around the world.

So here I am, on Sunday, at Duke's. Cool.

We've moved across the street from our last hotel, to the Moana Surfrider, which is right on Waikiki Beach, and our room has a window that opens right out over Duke's beach, with a view of Diamond Head. It's great to open the window and listen to the surf, which should be very soothing to our jet-lagged selves.

We had another nice dinner at the Hau Tree Lanai, and Danny the sommelier gave us another fine wine recommendation and also a taste of his newest acquisition, a fruit-infused sake that is really yummy.

Tomorrow, we hope to hit the Waikiki Aquarium, which we always seem to just miss, then hop a flight back home. That'll be another short day, but work awaits on Tuesday, so go we must! Until then, Hawaii is a pretty gentle way to slip back into the U.S.

One little travel note I should include is that we had something like 25 minutes to make our plane connection in Guam overnight, and I was dreading that, because of having to clear immigration and customs. But hey, they've changed things since the last time I went through there. Yes, we all had to clear immigration, but that was just a matter of swiping the passports. Customs we didn't have to clear until we got to Honolulu. So it turned out to be no sweat to make it to our connecting flight. Yay!