This year, the American Farm Bureau annual convention was in Honolulu, Hawaii.
I tell you, it was torture to have to go to this conference for a few business meetings. Just torture.
We flew all day on Saturday 1/7. By the time we got to the hotel it was 9:30pm Hawaii time, 1:30am Sunday morning our time. We were tired. I took this picture of Waikiki beach from our hotel room, and we passed out.
This was the view from our hotel room the next morning. Gorgeous, no? Yes!
Even the view from the convention center was breathtaking.
I could go to meetings here all the time.
We did have some time while we were on Oahu to do some site-seeing. We drove past a pineapple farm. Can you see the pineapples in this photo? They grow out of a plant, like a bush, on the ground. One plant will produce one pineapple in 2 years. Then you have to start over. Yikes! These are not ready to pick yet, but they were getting close.
We visited the Kualoa Cattle Ranch. This is a working cattle ranch, but they do a lot of tourism and movie sets. Lots of movies and TV shows have rented space here for sets (and almost none of them were set in Hawaii). This is a popular place for filming anything that is set in a tropical place.
Parts of the movie “Pearl Harbor” were filmed here, and some scenes from “Lost.”
So was part of “Jurassic Park.” (This was the tree they hid behind during the dinosaur stampede.)
This was a footprint from “Godzilla.” It originally was almost 30 feet deep. This is in part of the cattle pasture, and the cows kept falling in the hole. So they mostly filled in the footprint but left the outline.
They gave us a list of lots of other movies and TV shows that were here for filming, but I forgot most of them.
We did have some time to make it to Pearl Harbor. We didn’t get there until later in the afternoon, so we missed the ferries out to the USS Arizona and the battleship Missouri.
We did get to walk around the park and the museums that were in the national park. It was a very quiet, moving experience.
It will be worth going back to Hawaii, just to get to spend more time at Pearl Harbor.
Don’t worry, it wasn’t all work and sad memorials. After the conference, we stayed a few extra days and went over to Maui. I’ll post some photos from that part of the trip later this week!
YEAH Maui! 🙂