No matter what city in the world you visit, it always looks like they designed the highway in a different room from where they were forecasting automobile sales figures.

The sight of all these cars queued up against the beautiful backdrop of Hawai’i seems somehow obscene. Like this many fume-spewing machines shouldn’t be allowed in a setting this potentially pristine. (Those two sentences rhyme but it’s not on purpose.)

Beni and I are off for the North Shore, because I’m curious to see another part of the island. Ten minutes out of Honolulu the bumper-to-bumper traffic clears up, and it’s smooth sailing on beautiful highways with green mountains in the background.

Ninety minutes later we pull up in front of the Dole Pineapple Plantation and get out to stretch our legs. Tourists abound. There’s a little house in front filled with souvenirs and blatantly pro-pineapple propaganda. I’m something of a pineapple expert so the educational chart on how to tell a ripe pineapple is nothing new to me.

Beni gets a cone of pineapple-flavored ice cream, which a taste reveals to be surprisingly undisgusting. I stare at the Dole employees running around the plantation, wondering if they can appreciate my sacrifices; I’ve been eating pineapple every morning for about ten years so I’ve put half of their kids through college.

We go out into the field to see how pineapples grow, and I get a nasty shock: Pineapples grow above ground! For years I thought they grew underground. (See Fig. 1)

This is disturbing to me simply because it challenges my previously-held assumptions.

There are lots of tourists and their kids running around, making it difficult for me to take a good photo. I only squeezed off a few.

Pineapple workers who step out of line
are flattened by steamrollers, then placed
in the fields as a warning to other workers.

Even the one-armed Senator Bob Dole (or whatever Dole started the plantation; it might have been his wife, Liz) knows that fields full of nothing but pineapples are boring, so to spice it up they’ve added “attractions.” The Dole Plantation has the largest hedge maze in the world.

Apparently the way it works is this: Parents drop their children off at one end of the maze, then are escorted by tram to the other end, where they wait for their children to come out. If their children don’t make it through the maze in thirty minutes, the parents are sent away.

The children are then loaded onto another tram which takes them out into the fields to gather pineapples, never to be seen again.

The last vehicle Billy will ever see

After the Dole Plantation we get back in the car and drive north, and inside thirty minutes we’ve reached the shore. Oahu isn’t very big at all! Less than three hours from one end to the other. This must be a terrible place to hide from the law.

Honolulu, where we’d started off, is on the southern end of the island. From the northern end we have an option to drive back along the eastern perimeter of the island, or along the western perimeter, which would take us through Pearl Harbor. I didn’t want to go to Pearl Harbor, because I’ve already seen the movie, so we went the eastern route.

It’s a lot like driving down U.S. Route 1, in Cali. The shoreline was pretty--the coast often comes right up to the roadway--and we stopped frequently, to admire this beach or that. Occasionally a shower would hit and we’d have to put the roof up.

Along the way we passed the Polynesian Cultural Center.

(stock photo)

Had I more time I’d have stopped in, to expand my knowledge of Polynesians. I already know a fair amount about their culture but wouldn’t mind filling in the gaps.

Hawai’i Fun Fact #1

Polynesians invented polyurethane, polyhedrons and polygamy. Their advances in the fields of materials science, geometry and sociology are often overlooked.

Hawai’i Fun Fact #2

Similar to the Polynesians are their genetic cousins the Micronesians, who invented the microscope, the microphone, and the micromanagement style of business that pervades many offices to this day.

Hawai’i Fun Fact #3

In New York, Spam is something you delete, but in Hawai’i you have it for lunch.

After driving and beaching, driving and beaching we got hungry and stopped at a gas station. Beni ran inside and came back out with something in a bag.

“I got you a moose-[unintelligible],” she said.

“A what?”

“A musubi.” Ah. Hadn’t heard that word regularly since I lived in Japan. Didn’t even know they had them here. “It’s a Spam musubi,” she said, unwrapping it.

“Sounds gross,” I said. “I think I’ll pass.”

“Take a bite,” she said, in a don’t-be-an-idiot tone of voice. So I took a bite...and it was fucking delicious.

“Gimme that thing,” I said, while chewing.

“Told you so,” she said.