Hangin' Ten on the North Shore

Spent Friday morning and afternoon on the North Shore of Oahu. Only takes about 40 minutes to get to the main town of Hale'iwa. Talk about different world! Surfer dude and earth muffin territory. Really fun and ecclectic. Had the traditional lunch at the "original" Shrimp Truck - Giovanni's Shrimp truck. Parked on a tree lined dirt lot (with 3 other trucks - one shrimp, one Thai, one smoked something or other), order from the window, sit at a picnic table, compete with the flies for your peel and eat shrimp. After filling up on Shrimp Scampi and "Hot, Very Hot Shrimp (really hot, no refunds!)" - we cruised through horse country and surfer beaches before heading back to the Dole Pineapple plantation.

The Pineapple plantation is stark commercialism, but a fun way to waste a couple of hours (and we had plenty to waste since our flight didn't leave until midnight!). Passed on the train ride through the "plantation", but did stroll through their gardens (which we could have missed at $4 each, but thought we could waste some time there - did learn about how they plant the pineapples and send the picked pineapples to the Phillipines for processing and canning). Ate pineapple samples at the cutting demonstration - but the best was the Maze. The largest maze in the world (according to the 2001 Guinness Book of World Records), it was well worth the admission price - and kept us laughing and giggling our way through over 100,000 square feet of twists and turns. After an hour we had only found 4 out of 6 "secret" stations - so we gave it up and headed back down to Honolulu for dinner.

Ate at Formaggio's - a great little tapas place snuggled into the bottom side of a strip shopping center. Accoustic entertainment, fantastic wine selections, food outstanding (this is rapidly turning into a food junkie blog so I'm not going into details on what we had - but suffice it to say it was great!). The only down side was that the service was a little too quick. We were done by 7 and still had 5 hours to kill before flying to Auckland! Slowly drove back to the airport for check in - made there before the lines even opened. Hung out at the airport nursing drinks at the bar and then hopped the midnight flight to New Zealand!