Yesterday I woke up at 6am in order to get ready and drive across the island (and find a parking spot!) to attend the Mayor's Memorial Day Ceremony at Punchbowl. Initially I arrived at 7:20am which sounds early but ended up being a very good thing. HPD were only letting people with passes or who were participating in the ceremony enter the cemetery at that time, however they all commented on how much they liked my American Flag scarf, I found that funny! I drove a couple streets past and found a spot in a neighborhood and began walking. I arrived about 10min before the actual ceremony started at 8am, the funny thing is I ended up sitting next to the same lady I did at the ceremony we attended the year before! She's Australian and her husband is in the Marine Corps League, she even remembered Quinn (since he had been in the color guard) and asked how he was doing! Small island, right?
The ceremony was nice with the presentation of the wreaths/plants, the Mayor's speech, the 21 gun salute, multiple songs sung by the Aloha Choir accompanied by the Royal Hawaiian Band, ending with taps and a missing man fly-over:
The night before I had a really bad sweet tooth... so I had made sugar cookies, the problem was I made like 50! So I bagged them all up and passed them out to people throughout the day, including: the color guard marines at Punchbowl, HPD officers, and the gate-guards on base. They were all really surprised and thankful, especially the younger guys that got stuck working on everyone's day off.
1 comment:
It's always nice to see events like this that continue to honor our past and present men and women that serve to defend our freedom that we seem to take for granted all to frequently. Our thank you goes to all of them and our deepest gratitude to those who paid the ultimate price, their life.
Dad
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