North Shore Neighborhood

The North Shore apartment we rented was not fancy. It was the first floor of a family’s home, although we never actually saw the family. We did see and hear their dogs. And, during the last full day of our stay, a group of men were working on a project in the backyard. The best thing about the place was its location, specifically that it was just a five-minute walk to the beach. Other than the dog noises and those workmen, the house was relatively quiet and was situated in a lovely yard full of tropical plants.

There may have actually been two different families living in the spaces above us. There were at least two dogs.

It’s always interesting seeing shrub-sized plants like these growing outdoors. Where we live, one only ever sees very small specimens of tropical plants like that growing in pots at garden centers or many indoors at a large botanical garden.

We have lizards near us, but none that look quite like the one pictured. There were several of them in and around the garden.

There was almost always a breeze going while we were on Oahu. Every photo I captured of a Bird of Paradise flower in full bloom was blurry. But I think this bud is interesting enough to share.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Apparently there are a lot of different kinds of palm trees.

The next picture was capture behind the apartment.

The rest of the images shared here were captured during a walk to and from the beach.

The image on the far-left of that collage was taken from the beach, heading toward the apartment.

The yard of the next-door neighbor was meticulously maintained. I saw the homeowner on several occasions, carefully tending to the many plants.  It was pretty amazing.

 

 

 

The scene captured in the next two images made me chuckle aloud.

I imagined the person doing the power-washing, a chore that can be quite time-consuming, wanting to get done quickly, so they decided to make wave patterns on the concrete. It’s sort of appropriate, since the house is near the beach, but have you ever seen patterns left behind like that?

I really just think the person doing the power-washing could only think about the beach, i.e., how much they love the beach, how happy they are to live at the beach, how badly they wanted to get back to the beach to swim or surf or whatever, so they came up with this very creative way to do just that. Once they saw how long it took to get the sidewalk really clean, as pictured at the bottom of the image, they said “screw this!” and improvised. I suspect they didn’t really set out to make wave patterns on the sidewalk, they just wanted to get the job done faster so they could get back to the beach. Quite clever, if you ask me.

That was our North Shore neighborhood. In my next post I will be sharing pics from the other, more densely populated side of the island, captured the day we visited Honolulu, specifically Pearl Harbor and the world famous Waikiki Beach.