Beginning the Evaluation

Honolulu HI, -- 2/10/2006

I met the rest of the evaluation team yesterday morning at John Mcleod's hotel . John is NOAA's Team Leader for the evaluation. Dorina Frizzera is from the New Jersey coastal program. The three of us spent some time going over the issues and history of the coastal program at the Commonwealth of the Northern Marianas Islands where we will be working next week. We met John Parks, the Program Specialist from NOAA's Coastal Programs Division at the NOAA Pacific Services Center in Downtown Honlulu. After meeting with John Parks we took a lunch break and then explored a bit of downtown. We were able to take a quick look at some famous landmarks, including the Iolani Palace, pictured above, where Hawaii's royalty lived when it was a kingdom. On the grounds they have a huge kapok tree and some impressive banyon trees. Then it was back to the Pacific Services Center for meetings with the Bill Thomas, the Director, Kristina Kekuewa the Deputy Director, Ed Carlson the regional geodetic advisor, and Meghan Gombos, coral reef sepecialist.

Following out meetings at the Pacific Services Center we took a ride over to the University of Hawaii at Manoa to meet with Peter Rappa from the Hawaii Sea Grant program. Peter is an extension agent for coastal resource management with experience in CNMI. By the time we finished with that meeting it was time to wrap things up for the day.

I ended up at a very busy japanese seafood buffet named Todai for dinner. It was huge and filled with peolple moving quickly back and forth from the various buffet lines. The food was pretty good, not as good as last night, but it was a lot less expensive. I still have not seen any SPAM sushi yet. By the time I finished eating there was a line of people waiting to get in the door. I was worn out and ready to crash so I made it back to the hotel and called it a night. The hotel had already brought my luggage up to my new room so I just had to unpack and relax. By 10 p.m. I was asleep. Unfortunately even with trying to stay up as late as I could, (not very late by the local clock) I woke up at 3:30 a.m. this morning. That is 7:30 a.m. according to my biological clock which has obviously not gotten adjusted to the new time zone. It probably will adjust as I'm ready to fly out to an even more out of sync zone later in the week.

I think I'm going to get ready for the sun to come up and head down to walk around on Ala Moana Beach Park and Ainamoana State Recreation Area, both are spots I can see from my hotel room. It looks like today's agenda should have less sitting and meeting in conference rooms, but I don't know if we are going to have much time to explore today so I better get it in now. Aloha!