Little Black Guidebook

Hawaii | Oahu | Foster Botanical Garden | Cannonball Tree, originally uploaded by Aliaaaaa.

Today was the last day of the vacation together part of the trip. Tomorrow hubby reports for duty and I’m off exploring on my own. The navy lodging on Ford Island where we are staying has free wi-fi so I figured I would check-in.

So far we have gone sea-kayaking, taken an intro-to-scuba class, driven around the island, visited a Macadamia Nut Farm, and taken a few walks on the beach.

Today we wrapped it up by going to the Foster Botanical Garden. This small garden would have taken 20 minutes to walk through and wouldn’t have impressed us much without the guided tour. It has a small orchid garden and butterfly garden which were nice, but the rest was a lot of trees and non-flowering plants. However, these plants were really interesting when you take a tour with a botanist. We spent 2 hrs, just the two of us with a botanist taking us through the entire garden. I had no idea that there are over 4,000 varieties of palm tree or how so many of our spices are grown. The Foster Garden has daily tours at 1pm each day which are well worth the time. Typically the tour runs 1-1.5 hrs ($5 for non residents), but tourism is down so it was just the two of us so we got to go into far more detail, it was super cool.

The food has been fabulous and we’ve enjoyed every minute. I’ll post more later on the first two days of the trip.

Here is a slideshow I found on Flickr of the Foster Garden we were at today. It is from photographer Alia Luria who has a Creative Commons license on her work. She has a personal blog here. Thanks Alia, you perfectly captured the garden.