Paradise Day 3

This was our North Shore Day.

We woke up, and drove through the middle of the island towards the North Shore.

On the way, we stopped at the Dole plantation. Imagine a store surrounded by pineapples. Now imagine that store is filled with pineapples and pineapple-produced food. And pineapple related merchandise. And it has a yellow interior. You have just imagined the Dole plantation. The ice cream was very good though. After we strolled through the building, we decided to do the Pineapple Garden Maze. The conversation went something like this:

me: "Do you guys want to do the maze?"
(at the same time) MJ: "No." SS: "Yes."
MJ: "I mean, yes."

From that unanimous decision sprang forth our quest through the garden maze. The goal of the maze is to find 6 locations where there are stencils you have to trace onto a card. After you have found all 6, you come back to the start. They time you and if your time is one of the fastest 5 times, you get a poster. The 5th place time was 15 minutes, so we tried to beat that. At the beginning, we split up to try to find the 6 stencils faster and then were going to copy the stencils onto one card. After the girls found 4, and I found 2, we met up and were going to trace the cards. But SS didn't want to cheat so I showed them where the last 2 stencils they needed were. In the end, we made it out in 18 minutes. But SS kept her morals. I guess it's good that SS is the teacher and the two cheaters are an attorney and a software developer who pretends to fight piracy.

From there, we headed to Matsumoto's shave ice. It's basically a snow cone (with really soft ice) that you can get with ice cream or red bean or both. You can pick the syrup flavors and add condensed milk if you want. There was even a Caucasian lady that hesitantly ordered "red bean?" From her confused look, we knew there was no way she thought putting beans in ice would make anything remotely close to a good tasting dessert, but MJ assured her the beans were sweet and she had made the right choice. Way to spread the Asian culture, MJ.

As we resumed our drive to the North shore. We noticed some shrimp trucks and this ignited a debate whether we had passed the Mystical Blue Shrimp Truck of Awesomeness.

(The origin of the Mystical Blue Shrimp Truck of Awesomeness goes something like this: Before we left for Hawaii, JL/EL recommended we eat garlic shrimp from the roach coach shrimp trucks on the side of the road. All the trucks were located along the side of the freeway on the North shore. The most famous amoung tourists is Giovanni's, a white truck, but JL told us about a better truck which was blue.)

After much discussion and driving back and forth, we called up JL and asked him if we were in the correct place. Alas, we were not. We would not get to the Mystical Blue Shrimp Truck of Awesomeness until we were on the way back to the hotel.

We kept driving and came upon Waimea Beach. The waves were huge so we decide to go rent some boogie boards. After getting destroyed by the waves for most of the afternoon, we headed out and saw a surfing competition sponsored by Monster. Then we commenced Operation: Shrimp Truck. We drove along the coast on the way back to the hotel, keeping our eyes peeled for the Mystical Blue Shrimp Truck of Awesomeness. We passed Giovani's and knew we were on the right track. We looked. And looked. We called JL. And looked. But, we couldn't find it and ended up back at the hotel. SS and I were very sad. Since we couldn't find it, we just decided to eat at Willows, a buffet.

Since I didn't know they had self-parking, I pulled into their valet lot. Then we rushed inside because they were about to close and ate hurriedly. Then we got our bill. $30/person. The buffet was definitely not THAT good. All in all, a subpar experience. Especially since the next day, MJ got food poisoning.