We arrived in Honolulu yesterday morning, and I took this picture as I was walking off my breakfast, as I need to do on most days and after most meals here on the ship. In fact, I try to walk after every meal in my effort to maintain my weight loss and my attempt to reverse my diabetes. Getting back to this picture, I took it because it reminded me of a slide my dad took when we flew to NZ in 1960. (For those who are wondering what the hell a slide is in this context, it is basically a picture taken with a special film that you view with a projector which projects the image onto a screen or wall. It was the principal method my dad used to record the sights and experiences of our travels.) We stayed in a hotel on Waikiki Beach and the slide he took from our hotel of the beach had Diamondhead in the background. I haven’t seen the slide in years, but it is a permanent memory for me (of course it could be that fact that we never stayed in hotels and it was such a novel concept for four year old me 😆 – plus I should mention that it was the first time I had been to a beach, spent the night in a place with over a thousand or two people, etc.).
Our trip to NZ started when my aunt, who was living and working on Oahu at the time, told my father of a job opening for a teacher at CCNZ (Church College of New Zealand), a Mormon college in Temple View, NZ, just outside of Hamilton, NZ. After an interview and acceptance, (and a nurse or doctor taking my Butt for a pin cushion – or target practice – inoculating me from an extreme number of exotic diseases which caused me, according to my mother, to pass out for twenty-four hours) we were exchanging our lives in Plains in remote western Montana, town of less than a thousand, for a former British colony ten thousand or so miles away. We took a DC-3 (an old form of airfare) from Missoula, MT, to Seattle, WA, where we boarded a newer, at the time, 707 for Hawai’i. I experienced hotels, heat and humidity, and beaches for the first time. It was amazing to me, I am sure – if I could just remember my sentiments at the time – but being just four and having a poor memory, all I have are the slides my father took and his narration as he bored friends and family with his side presentations 🤪. One experience I think I remember was driving to a pineapple plantation, buying a pineapple, and eating for the first time that delicious juicy fruit. (I think it is a true memory and not an implanted memory because I still salivate whenever I think of it. 😋 )
Other memories, probably implanted from the aforementioned slide presentations, were of a luau and a visit to the Polynesian cultural center since it was affiliated with the Mormon church and my aunts job at the time in Hawai’i. My introduction to paradise 🏝.
After our brief stay on Oahu, we flew to Figi and then on to Auckland. I wonder as I write this what my feelings were about such a huge change in my life. Probably being four they were not very profound even in the face of the upcoming adventure of living in another country, starting school there, meeting new friends, encountering a new culture and climate (having Christmas in the middle of summer – and going to the beach, a small example), and all of the other interesting and fascinating experiences I had living there for four years.