Baseball in Paradise

by monksathletics

 

Hey there, ever since my last blog I haven’t been able to play much baseball because of my toe.  I was fortunate enough to make All Star team but my injury would not allow me to play in the All Star game.  On the bright side I’ve gotten plenty of rest and I’m going to be able to play today.  With the All Star break we have been able to take a lot of time to do the things we’ve hoped to do out here. 

One of my roommates who has been dealing with an arm injury had to go back home this week, so on his last day we figured we would make the most of it.  We woke up early and rented mopeds for the day.  Without a plan or a real destination we began to just ride and see where it took us.  This didn’t happen to be the brightest idea at first when our curiosity brought us on the Pali highway, one of the busiest highways in the busiest city for traffic.  Especially considering the highway was uphill and our mopeds could barely go 45 downhill… After realizing our potentially devastating mistake we took the first exit back toward Pearl Harbor. 

Since we had already done the Pearl Harbor tour we decided to see what else was around the area.  This brought us to a lagoon right next to the airport.  Here we were able to watch planes take off basically right over our heads.  We were also able to see some small planes landing right on the water.  However, despite our intimidating mopeds, the owners of the wedding chapel right on the lagoon had no problem asking us to move them out of the parking lot because they had a wedding coming in.  So we rode on. 

Another interesting thing we discovered in our travels was that cats run free like squirrels out here.  People come out and feed these wild cats daily too.  We decided to ride directly down the coastline to see what we could find.  We end up finding a few new beaches, and one of the nicest neighborhoods I have ever seen in my life.  So nice that they had a security guard there to tell us we had to turn around… So we headed back the way we came and found a few scenic points (typical tourist stuff).  At one of these points we saw Diamond Head mountain in the distance.  My roommate and I decided we’d climb it.  In our casual, spur of the moment decision to climb it we were pumped!  Then we got to the bottom and realized “wow, this is a lot steeper than we thought”.  But we realized that you only live once so we got after it.  About half way we realized that the decision to climb this isn’t one you make after a long 7 hour day of mopeding, but we trudged along.  Upon arriving at the top we immediately knew the hike up was worth it.  The hike back down was a different story…  Exhausting.

That’s what I did during my full day off, it was a great experience, heres a picture of the view from the top of Diamond Head.

Thanks!

Joe Coyne