We left Waikiki to see downtown Honolulu and Iolani Palace. Our route took us past the old judiciary building and one of the statues of King Kamehameha I. Downtown we saw some very colorful street markets, and had some limited-edition McDonald’s mango peach pies.

Shortly before our trip, the Hawaiian Kingdom Government had blocked access to Iolani Palace to all but those with Hawaiian bloodlines. By the time we arrived, the group had been relegated to a small area of the grounds, but were physically preventing people from viewing their proceedings (my brothers had curiously wandered over to see what was going on, and were physically shooed away by some big dudes). I was purchasing tickets for our group and missed this experience.

The audio tour of Iolani Palace itself is very thorough (almost a little too thorough) and very educational. The audio recording for each room has a full description of its significance, but also contains a good amount of historical context as well. Audio tours are one of the things Patrika and I do at museums on vacations, but even for me, I found myself wishing the audio snippets would hurry up so we could move on to the next station.

This “Pearl Harbor Museum” is not really a museum per se, and as such it might leave many visitors feeling disappointed. It is really just a memorial to the sailors on the USS Arizona when Pearl Harbor was attacked. The Smithsonian-like exhibits one might be expecting to find, such as those on Japanese airplanes or US aircraft carriers and other WW2-era military technology, will be rather conspicuously absent.

The better expectation to set would be akin to a visit to Arlington National Cemetery or some similar site. There is a small museum, but in general, the USS Arizona Memorial is more of a quiet beautiful place than it is some kind of Pearl Harbor museum. The other related sites might be a better match for those interests, but I can’t say (we visited neither the USS Missouri, the USS Bowfin, nor the Pacific Aviation Museum).

The minimal museum does have a few interesting scale models of US and Japanese ships. There were also some Pearl Harbor survivors in front of the book store talking to people and doing book signings.

We arrived at 8am and the line already stretched out to the parking lot, with lots of people fighting for pictures at the front of the grounds. However, the line moved quickly, and we entered to get tickets for the 9:15am group to see the film and board the boat for the actual memorial. When we left around 11am, the line was completely gone (although there were plenty of people inside waiting for their memorial film showing and boat ride), leaving the grounds completely free for anyone to photograph without random people in the way.