Hawai'i

Choosing to write instead of reading other people's writing. It's a simple thing, really, to change your ways. You decide to do it and you do. Or you don't. But we make it difficult by thinking of everything that we could possibly be doing instead and we push the thing that we need to be doing to the back of our minds, hoping that it will go away if we just don't think about it, and it does, because that's the way the brain works.

So I'm writing now, instead of eating more sea salt and vinegar chips and watching television. I won't be up long, so this won't be a long entry. But I need to be up long enough to hear that my downstairs neighbor has stopped watching loud television and the burned pizza smell (his) has faded from my apartment. Come to think of it, it might be a while. (I can't wait to move out of this apartment.)

Hawaii. What can I say? It's Hawaii. It's beautiful, warm, comfortable, relaxed, lovely, isolated, green, wild, delicious. After an hour layover in Seattle, we landed on Maui at 9pm or so on December 16th. The first shock, the first clue that you've arrived is the gush of humid air that hits you as you step out of the canned air of the airplane into the (sort of) fresh air of the plane-to-terminal tunnel. The need to peel off your layers of Minnesota clothes arises and you're suddenly wishing you'd packed sandals in your carry-on. But those are welcome discomforts. Humid and warm trumps -3º any day.

We rented a convertible. A Sebring, in fact. We had a lot of luggage, even though we'd planned not to. Sebrings, now, they don't have much trunk space. So our laps were pressed into service. Oh, and we had the top down. It was chilly in the backseat.

Our hotel was gorgeous, even though geckos and roaches attempted to reclaim the space after we moved in. The geckos were cute. The roaches were not. We didn't do much that night except try to find some food. We ended up eating at Jack in the Box. Heh.

The next morning we found the place that would be our near daily breakfast location. It was called the "Kihei Cafe", Kehei (KEE-hay) being the town that it was in. The food was excellent and reasonably priced. I got pork fried rice for breakfast every time we ate there. In retrospect I should have tried some of the other items on the menu, but the fried rice was enough of a lure to keep me eating it every time. If I could have shoveled some of it in my backpack and brought it back for everyone to taste I would have. That stuff was GOOD.

We drove east along the southern end of the island as far as we could go. We stopped at a small church in Makena (I think it only has one "n") and took a few pictures. Someone was rehearsing their wedding. There were poinsettias growing wild in the churyard and my sister and I made our parents pose for pictures. Some of the other tourists apparently couldn't read, as they sat and stood on some of the gravestones when there was a sign that we CLEARLY marked, "Please don't sit or stand on the graves." I would continue to be annoyed and appalled by tourist behavior throughout the rest of trip.

Further down the road, past Makena, we ran into a single lane road. On either side were fields of relatively newly cooled lava. My sister explained that there was a flow there in 1790 (recent!) and the stuff that looked like crumbly red cereal was called a'a. My father cracked a joke, "Is that because people fall down a hole and they go, 'Aaaaaaaaa!'?" My sister replied, "Yeah, haven't heard that one." My mother has an excellent picture of my sister and I in her rearview mirror taking pictures of the flow. I wish I had it.

I wish I could remember what we did the next day, but my pictures prompt me to move on to Lahaina (la-HIGH-nuh). Lahaina is an old shipping and whaling town, and looks very much like the seaports we visited in the Caribbean. On one end of the town, a banyan tree takes up an entire city block. It was only eight feet tall when it was planted (over 100 years ago). Banyan's grow by spreading out their branches horizontally and dropped down fine roots from those extended branches. Over the years, those roots thicken to the size of tree trunks themselves. People have climbed and carved on all parts of the tree until the limbs were worn and smooth. I reached up to touch a branch, felt the smoothness, and immediately thought of all the other germy hands that had been on it in the last 100 years. I whipped out my hand sanitizer.

Lahaina was one of my parent's favorite spots when they went to Maui three years ago. It's changed now, they said, and they think it's because of the cruise ships that stop there now. It used to be quiet, with a few shops lining the street and few tourists ambling around. Now there's a Bubba Gump's®, art galleries on every corner, hanging signs beckoning tourists in for cheap tchotckes, and music blaring out of other tourist trap restaurant. We did have one of our best meals at the Lahaina Fish House, but overall Lahaina was not my favorite place.

I'll stop here for tonight. Too much vacation recap causes brain mush. G'night.