Okay, maybe it's not that old, but it's been going on since I was a kid.
Sometime in the wee morning hours, the bakers at Kanemitsu Bakery in Kaunakakai get up and begin baking their famous Molokai Bread. When I was a kid, you walked down the scary and very dark alley behind the bakery in the middle of the night. Then you banged on the door until a baker decided to open it.
Then, if you were lucky, the baker would sell you a loaf of hot Molokai Bread buttered by the baker himself.
Whoa, ono!
Today, things are slightly different. There is a light bulb in the alley, but it's still as gross and disgusting an alley as ever...
But now there's even a menu outside the door and a line of people who want the bread in the middle of the night.
Now they'll add strawberry cream cheese or other toppings to the hot bread -- and it's even better than ever!
With that last evening, it was time to leave Kaunakakai and Molokai...
Of course, on the way out of town, you need to fill up the rental car with gas at this whopping price...
And as I said in a few posts back, we rented our car from Da Kine Auto Rental. Only Budget and Dollar Rent-A-Car can be found at the airport, and they were both sold out because of the Bicoy Ohana Reunion.
So we turned to this little local place no where near the airport. To turn in the rental, we pretty much did this...
Which is just park it at the airport. We were told to leave all the doors unlocked and put the keys under the matt.
You gotta love Molokai.
So our tiny little plane finally arrived...
And we crowed on board. We were sitting in the very last row when taking this picture so you get an idea of how small the airplane really is...
Paula Danielle Bicoy, my cousin, joined us on board the plane...
As did my Uncle Puncho and Aunty Mary. And Aunty Jill. And nephew Shane and his wife. And two other people I didn't really know but were friends of one my cousins.
I told you Bicoys are crawling all over Molokai.
We left Alyssa behind with my sister Dawn for the next few days because she was having so much fun. This meant that Bretty and David had to sit together in the row in front of me.
I know they'd hate that I posted this picture, but look at them comforting each other during the bumpy take off...
The picture below is of Diamond Head, although most folks wouldn't know it...
The famous Diamond Head you see is a picture of it from Waikiki Beach. Diamond Head itself is a dormant volcano so it's round!
Anyway, once back in Honolulu, we decided to leave the two baby girls with Grandma and take my Dad to the USS Missouri.
Pearl Harbor is home to the greatest symbols marking the start and the end of World War II.
The bombing of Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941 sunk the USS Arizona and was the day the United States entered the War. The Arizona Memorial stradles the sunken hull of the USS Arizona to this day.
On September 2, 1945, the Japanese High Command unconditionally surrendered to the Allied forces on the deck of the USS Missouri anchored in Tokyo Bay.
Today, the Arizona Memorial and the USS Missouri sit side by side in Pearl Harbor...
It's hard to get an appreciation of exactly how massive a battleship is until you stand in front of it...
The USS Missouri is the final of the Iowa class battleships -- the largest war making vessels every conceived of by the United States Navy. It is 5 feet longer and 18 feet wider than the famous Titanic. It is the last the last battleship every constructed and will likely always be so. The modern Navy wields its strength from air power so aircraft carriers are far more important.
But even today, no warship was ever more powerful in its own right (aside from aircraft) than the USS Missouri.
Consider the size of its 16 inch guns. They certainly look large as Cari stands in front of one of the turrets...
But to really get a perspective of their size, look at Cari and the boys standing directly in front of the turret...
Each barrel is 65 feet long and weighs 116 tons!
To fire a round, you needed two of these gun powder kegs (which Kekoa is pretending to eat because he said they looked like marshmellows)...
The shell itself fired from the 16 inch gun is bigger than Bretty...
A shell weighs 2,700 pounds and could be fired and hit a target 23 miles away in 50 seconds.
There are three 16 inch gun turrets, each with 3 barrels. They are the largest and most powerful guns ever placed on any warship ever, even to this day.
Grandpa Bernie watched the bombing of Pearl Harbor as an 18 year old in 1941 and joined the army after the attack on December 7th of that year.
So he was very familiar with some of the weapons, including this machine gun which he explained to David...
Every bit of the USS Missouri is built to withstand a direct hit from an enemy shell. The bridge itself appears to be a typical square room high on the ship. Within that room, however, is the real operation center of the ship...
This operations center is in a cylinder that is enclosed within some 18 inches of steel. Here is the door to the nerve center of the ship to give you an idea of the thinkness of the steel...
Finally, we found something thicker than Bretty's head.
Amazingly, Grandpa Bernie had never visited the USS Missouri so he was fascinated to be standing at the very spot on the deck upon which General MacArthur and Admiral Nimitz accepted the unconditional surrender of Japan...
After this little trek back into our nation's relatively near history, we made a swing back home to pick up a few strays who were put to work by Grandma cleaning chairs...
Of course, neither Nalani or Malia wanted to leave because they were having so much fun with the hose. Finally, the agreed to join us as Grandpa Bernie switched places with Grandma Betty.
We were off to visit the early period of Hawaii from the 1840s through the 1930s plantation days...
This is a village recreating the plantation buildings which brought immigrants from Asia to work in the sugar cane and pineapple fields. My Dad said he had no interest in reliving the decrepit homes from his youth!
Everything from Filipino homes to Japanese Shinto Shrines characterized Hawaii of a century ago...
Even communal baths were commonplace with a single bath like the one below but with a wall separating the men's area from the women's...
Grandma Betty was excited to show Kekoa what a radio looked like from her youth (presumably the Manitowoc, Wisconsin version, though -- it probably was basically the same radio only underneath six layers of blankets)...
And even today, this recreated plantation grows taro, which is still harvested in the old ways...
My back hurts just looking at that picture!
At the entrance/exit to the plantation is a giant tree which was planted from a clipping of the original tree under which Buddha himself once sat so long ago...
Maybe my kids are more enlighted as a result!
2006 marks the 100th anniversary of the Filipino's arrival in Hawaii and a special exhibit celebrating important Filipinos was on display.
Cari is grinning because she recognizes the name of one of these famous Filipinos in American history...
Here's a closer look (check the third name down)...
Too bad Dad didn't come after all!
Of course this is a far cry from generations past when Filipinos weren't so accepted in the United States.
Here's a photograph of a door from California in the 1930s...
"Positively No Filipinos Allowed" was written on the door.
As my grandfather used to say, "If they no let you in the door, go through the window."
I guess we did.
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