Holiday pressures getting to you? My season’s gifts are three things that will help you relax, divert and decompress.
As a package, it’s the Quirky Oahu Tour.
I’m not talking tour as in vacation package. It’s not scenic or cultural in the way we normally think of culture when we talk about Hawaii.
But it is cultural — in a very different way.
The columnist in front of a train exhibit at the attraction operated by the Hawaiian Railroad Society.
Neal Milner/Civil Beat
It’s a tour of the ordinary and what makes looking at the ordinary significant and fun.
The three parts of the tour involve a train, a car, and a radio.
The Train
Get on board the old Oahu Railway and Land Company train operated by the Hawaiian Railroad Society.
The only operating railroad on Oahu runs on an historic stretch of track between the end of Renton Road in Ewa Beach and Kahe Point. The round-trip ride takes 90 minutes.
Man, I really love this one. I’ve taken this train several times, once on my 70th birthday. You can tell why I didn’t date much in high school.
Why do this? Because it’s a train, folks! You can’t ride one anywhere else here. Kids love it.
But also for much more. For adults it’s an experience that brings back memories and triggers the imagination.
And the trip offers a panoramic history lesson without, you know, being all that preachy or teachy about it.
A tour guide gives a running history, but the sound system is not so good. You don’t need it.
Beautiful scenery? Nah, scrub, newish Kapolei houses, big box stores, and acres of nondescript flatlands.
But interesting and important? You bet. It is a brought-to-you-live illustration of, for better or worse, the future Oahu.
In many ways the ride is a blank canvas, a tableau you fill yourself.
From these few miles of track you witness enormous changes. I first took this train before Kapolei was developed and Ko Olina had barely begun. There was nothing but open fields. You could still see sugar cane.
Now the transitions are astonishing — and a little frightening. Kapolei shot up. Between Kapolei and Ko Olina a huge tract of land, which once included an old Hawaiian settlement, that is being developed for housing. And of course Ko Olina itself.
The Car
Drive from the North Shore to Hawaii Kai entirely on surface streets.
Honolulu’s freeways are boring. Driving on them you get little sense of the textures and oddities of Oahu’s neighborhoods.
There is a huge difference between seeing the distant HART tracks from the H1 near Pearl City and experiencing them up close driving down Kamehameha Highway.
Stop on the way if you want, but don’t look for the usual tourist attractions. (Think of downtown Wahiawa instead of Dole Plantation.)
Suggestions: Waialua, the last place on Oahu with a small town feel; the hilly climb on Kaukonahua Road with its truck farms in the distance and the withered flower traffic death memorials on the shoulder.
Overview of Waialua High School.
Cory Lum/Civil Beat
Or the stretch of Kamehameha Highway between Waipahu and Aiea that gives you the best firsthand (you are virtually under the tracks) lesson of what rail is going to be like. Not pretty but for real.
In Aiea take a short detour to view the Aiea Shopping Center (and maybe get oxtail soup. See below) to see the oddest designed strip mall on Oahu.
The drive up Kapiolani Boulevard through Moiliili, Kapahulu and Kaimuki will give you a powerful sense of what living in urban Honolulu has been like and how that is changing.
The Radio
Listen to Mufi Hannemann’s oldies show Saturdays from noon to 2 p.m. on Hawaii’s Gold 107.9 FM.
Yeah, that guy, the politician you loved to hate or hated to love. Put all that history aside, at least for a couple of hours on a Saturday afternoon.
Mufi’s show hooks you into some little things that make Hawaii unique.
Mufi Hannemann’s oldies radio show is enjoyable for listeners of all political persuasions.
Cory Lum/Civil Beat
He plays and talks about former Billboard hits and Hawaiian classics from the same period, Shelley Fabares singing “Johnny Angel” (“Every time he says ‘hello’ my heart begins to fly”) Bobby Goldsboro’s “Honey” (a song that still makes me well up) and Rep Replinger’s “Fate Yanagi.” Try listening to any of Rep’s bits without thinking of all the others.
But it’s the vibe that is nice, amateur in the best sense. The show feels like small town radio used to be here.
Mufi does not sound like a DJ. It’s as if you’re at his house listening to and talking about his stack of 45s.
Not your taste in music? It’s worth listening anyway just to hear the old school commercials advertising local companies, many of which go way back with Mufi to his political days.
These commercials sound as if they were made in someone’s carport, like those old K. Ifuku Radiator jingles. Perfecto.
Other highlights:
• Kapiolani Coffee Shop’s jingle plugging its famous oxtail soup: “Put some soul in your bowl.”
• The commercial for H & D Trucking, that big rig place next to Lowe’s on Nimitz, bragging that the Rolling Stones use flatbed trucks to move their stuff.
• And just enough smattering of politician Mufi — like mentioning his Harvard education and basketball prowess — to bring back some of those old political emotions of yours.
This is not a nostalgia tour. You want a things-were-better-when-we-were-younger theme, go to your high school reunion.
The Quirky Tour is about seeing, really seeing, blemishes and all.
Most of all, it is about you.
The tour gives you a chance to break the patterns of everyday life by exploring everyday life. That may sound odd, but think about how much of our daily pressures and routines deaden our powers of observation and imagination.
So the Quirky Tour offers you a chance to remember, imagine and maybe daydream a little about things so integral to your life that you take them for granted.
Have a happy holiday.
The post Neal Milner: Three Oahu Attractions That Might Brighten Your Holidays appeared first on Honolulu Civil Beat.