A milestone birthday on the beach at Waikiki
On Tuesday, we finally reached the special day that this trip was planned to celebrate – Cathy’s 50th birthday. After our long and hot day at Pearl Harbor the previous day, this would be a calm beach day, with dinner at a great restaurant that night.
After a walk on the beach, we went for breakfast at the beachfront Ocean House, another of the restaurants in the Outrigger Reef Waikiki Beach Resort, starting it off right with mimosas.
Excellent Eggs Benedict. Unlike the situation at many hotels at this level, we never felt that we were being nickled-and-dimed to death. Wi-fi is free, there’s no “resort fee”, and food prices are reasonable. Mimosas are $7 each, Eggs Benedict $14 and coffee $4.
A telephoto shot of the beach action, taken from our breakfast table.
We decided to do a bit of exploring over towards Waikiki Beach proper after breakfast. I particularly wanted to see the Royal Hawaiian, the grande dame of Waikiki hotels.
I’m not a big fan of pools when the ocean is available, but the infinity pool at the Sheraton Waikiki is pretty cool, especially since Gray’s Beach there has pretty much disappeared. A plan to restore Gray’s Beach at that point was developed in 2007, but it doesn’t seem to have begun yet.
The beachfront sidewalk is beautiful, but narrows down to barely 2 people wide for a while. This was as far towards Waikiki Beach as we went – it just looked too busy for us.
The high concave concrete wall below the beach walk makes surf fun to watch.
This tiny cove was providing kids with lots of fun riding the surf.
Cathy’s choice for dinner was House Without a Key in the Halekulani hotel next door to ours. Reservations are not available, so we got there just before the 5:00 pm start of dinner service. Cathy and I started with the mai tais that the restaurant is justly famous for.
Hawaiian music with hula performed by a former Miss Hawaii under a huge century-old Kiawe tree packs the cocktail part of House Without a Key. Arriving early got us one of the best view dining tables, but to get this shot with Diamond Head in the background I had to walk across the lawn in front of our table for about 100 feet.
House Without a Key is widely considered to be one of the best restaurants in Honolulu, but we felt that prices were reasonable. The mai tais are $14, the highly recommended coconut shrimp appetizers are $16, and the swordfish, which our server said the chef has perfected (and I agree) was $29. If you like coffee, it’s very good (a Kona blend apparently), but is $6.
Another beautiful sunset, at 6:07.
The light just after sunset was gorgeous. The dancer was unfortunately doing a costume change and didn’t return until it was dark a few minutes later.
We spent almost 3 hours at House Without a Key – it truly was the perfect setting for this celebration.
We finished the evening off with our favourite activity, a walk on the beach.
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