To make sure that we won't miss our plane we drove to Seattle on Friday night. We thought that sleeping in Radisson would help us figure out our sleep number, but the remote didn't work... as incredible as it sounds :), we don't even know the number we slept on. After an early rise, We dropped Blacky at the Extra Car parking lot, then took off. For a few minutes we admired the snow-covered Olympic Mountains, then we could only see the ocean. When the east coast of Oahu became visible (after about 5 hours), I took a few pictures in which I later identified Hanauma Bay and Diamond Head.

We checked out into our hotel, then had some exotic burgers at Cheseburger Waikiki. It took us a while to figure out what bus to take to the Diamond Head and we got there at around 4:40 (which was pretty late taking into account that they close the park at 6:00).

After walking through a tunnel, we made it inside the crater and hiked up toward the crater rim. The hike is not extremely streneous - the most difficult parts were some stairs and a very low ceiling at the exit of a tunnel. The clouds protected us from the excessive heat that apparently is common. The downside was that our pictures came out a little faded, with darker rather than bright colors. Once we got to the observation deck, a nice panorama of Honolulu opened up in front of us. This would be a very nice spot to observe the sunset, but it's not worth the risk to spend the night locked up in the park.

On the way back we took a bus to Waikiki beach, then we walked on Kalakaua Ave all the way from West to the East of the beach. After waking around through the torch-lit streets, we went back to our hotel to get ready for another early rise.

• Diamond Head
• Driving around Oahu
• Pearl Harbor
• Volcanoes National Park
• Road to Hana
• Haleakala and Makena
• North Kohala
• North Kauai
• Waimea Canyon