We're back home in Birch Bay, Washington, after a relaxing five nights in Honolulu.
To answer the questions we posed in our most recent post, our Alaska flight landed at HNL about an hour late.
Our driver from Hawaii23 was waiting for us and transported us promptly to the Hilton Garden Inn Waikiki Beach.
The hotel did give us a room with an upgraded view. We could look over the parking garage sitting above the International Marketplace, and spot the ocean in the distance.
The HGI, while not at all luxurious, is a perfectly adequate property with friendly staff, and sits in an ideal location for the purposes of our trip, which was to relax, walk as best as we could in high heat and humidity, and enjoy our dining experiences without breaking the bank.
We managed to walk 2-4 miles daily, not an impressive amount but not bad for a couple of geezers used to the cool and rainy northwest facing Honolulu's daily 85-86 F (30 C) temperatures.
As to finding good eats at reasonable prices, we looked for ethnic food favored by locals and also Happy Hour menus in restaurants known for their food.
For example, we enjoyed lunch at Marugame Udon, just down Kuhio Avenue a block from our hotel. We lined up, mainly with Japanese tourists and locals as far we could tell, decided on the menu what we would order by number, picked up trays, picked up our food, and paid at the counter cafeteria-style. There was plenty to eat for about $20 each.
Our first full evening we chose a splurge place on the beach, Hula Grill Waikiki. Our waiter was Sterling, and he was indeed a sterling waiter. It all made for a great, if rather expensive, evening.
Another evening we averaged down the cost and found Piko, an eatery less than a block from our hotel in the other direction from Marugame Udon on Kuhio Avenue. There we enjoyed beer, burgers, and Bao buns for $5 each (the Bao buns were actually 2 for $5). Not elegant but tasty.
We decided before the trip that we'd return for Happy Hour to Wolfgang's Steakhouse on the third floor of the Royal Hawaiian Center, less than a 10-minute walk from our hotel. This is not one of Wolfgang Puck's restaurants, but rather that of Wolfgang Zwiener, which we'd discovered on a previous Honolulu visit.
This Wolfgang started his career as a head waiter at Peter Luger's famous New York establishment, and now has his own chain of restaurants in various parts of the world.
We enjoyed the traditional American steakhouse ambience, and Kathy found on the menu the single most spectacular Happy Hour dish of our trip, three jumbo (and we mean JUMBO) prawns on a bed of mashed potatoes. At $27, it wasn't cheap, but it was both delicious and a good value.
On our final night we dined at Stripsteak, up on the Grand Lanai, the third and open level of the Hawaiian Marketplace, rated by TripAdvisor as its Number 3 Honolulu restaurant.
We should note that for our five-night visit we managed to stay with modest success on West Coast PDT, three hours ahead of Honolulu, so happy hours starting at 3 or 4 p.m. felt like dinner to us. At 4:00 p.m., Stripsteak was deserted and we got plenty of friendly conversation from no fewer than three friendly bartenders during our visit.
One of them suggested splitting the $79 three-course Pau Hana Tasting, by adding on a 20 ounce bone-in Prime Ribeye steak. We never would have done this ourselves, but this brought the price of an absolutely elegant meal down to $60 each. We were so full that we couldn't finish the last few bites of our shared cheesecake dessert.
It was a wonderful grand finale to our Honolulu visit.
Our 5:30 a.m. shuttle pickup Wednesday morning was fairly manageable. On the climb out of HNL, we caught a good view of the Diamond Head crater.
We thoroughly enjoyed our Alaska flight back to Seattle, complete with filling and tasty breakfasts.
We landed at SEA on time around 4:45 p.m. PDT.
One last restaurant plug: Rather than facing the five o'clock rush through Seattle and northward on I-5, we drove over to our longtime favorite area restaurant, Grazie in Southcenter, and enjoyed dinner there. It's nice to see it listed on Trip Advisor as Number 2 of 165 Tukwila restaurants. We always root for the independent restaurants.
A bonus was running into the owner, a woman whom we'd met some years ago, and chatting for awhile.
We bought our Alaska tickets on a one-day two-for-one sale, and it made for a cost-effective trip.
We now have five days to get ready for our next adventure, a flight to Durango Colorado for Kathy's high school reunion. We'll reveal in the next post how many years it's been since she graduated, but leave you with the hint that it's more than ten.
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