At the beginning of this sporadic accounting of our Hawaiian vacation last fall, I mused on 100 Days of Hawai’i, and I threatened to go all “grandpa” on y’all. As this parade of entries has wound down, I think the ol’ grandpa genes kicked in more. Therefore I’ll keep this short, sweet, and hopefully mildly entertaining.
After the visit with my cousin our first full day on Maui, we loitered for three days as described recently. Two serendipitous events occurred to ensure an encore visit with my cousin and her husband. First, I left my camera and that package of very expensive Kona coffee in their car after our first visit. And second, I realized there was no way we wanted to get to the Kahului airport by 7 a.m. if that meant a one-hour drive and dropping a rental car. It would have seriously impacted the lazy vibe we were working on! I rebooked the flight for the next day, booked a hotel near the airport, and told my cousin so we could meet again for another visit since they lived near the hotel and the airport. This gave us a day to leave the Kapalua condo leisurely, stop at various viewpoints on the southern coast, and spend a lot of time at the Maui Aquarium.
Our last good view of the coast (from land anyway): the Papawai Scenic Lookout. The western end of Maui is on the left, a tiny dab of land in the center is Molokini, and at the right edge is Kaho’olawe. September 2024.
Even in the populated middle of Maui where things are fairly dry (see above), the mountains showed how they catch the clouds and their rain.
Looking west at dusk from Kahului. The Dunes at Maui Lani golf course in the foreground. The mountains are the reason one drives around the coast to Lahaina and Kapalua. September 2024.
Except for a few photos I couldn’t resist posting while on the vacation, I opened this lengthy travelogue with aerial shots of Oahu and Hawai’i. It seems only fitting we say goodbye to Maui and the Hawaiian Islands the same way.
Our plane skirted the northern coast of Maui, then banked to the east and the mainland. My last view of Maui and the Hawaiian Islands. September 2024.
Looking back near four months now I cannot recall what we did of note for the three days after we connected with my cousin during our first full day on Maui. Only two salient things leap to mind: hanging at the nearest pool on the second day and driving the north coast a bit on the fourth. It seems as if we must have done something else…didn’t we? Our fourth day also represented our final full day on the western end of Maui. We had been told the natives didn’t really like tourists going up along the north shore, but we took a ‘chance’ and except for a bit of display for what I think represented a Hawai’i Separatist Movement we experienced no animosity. We certainly saw spectacular scenery as the road dove to near sea-level and then ascended to the tops of cliffs.
Our rental car, the ocean, and a spectacular sky above. Molokai in the distance. September 2024.Once upon a time I might have tried snorkeling but not now, and certainly not in this partially protected bay. (Little dots are people snorkeling.) September 2024.Unfortunately for my pictorial record, few pull-offs existed. At this one you can see a good representation of the north coast. The hill in the background has an incline in it as the road we’re on continues. We drove down to near-sea level in the bay out of the photo to the right. September 2024.
By my estimation I took around 100 photos of the coast and/or sunrises/sunsets while we lingered on Kapalua Bay. Dawn would start with the low-contrast promise of sun:
Pre-dawn, last morning on Kapalua Bay. Molokai to the left. September 2024.
And sometimes not so low-contrast…
This photo taken 20 minutes prior to the above it. Maui, September 2024.
I guess most of the time we stared at sunrises in the morning, sunsets in the evening and in between we ate and stared at stuff like this…
Breakers just beyond our shore, nearing sunset. Kapalua Bay, Maui, September 2024.
Our second morning at our Kapalua condo we decided the odd mix of “general store” and “deli counter” at the Honolua Store #89 which we had seen our first night going to dinner bore further scrutiny. For one, eating muffins two consecutive days for breakfast held no appeal. Two, I needed that coffee as explained in my Kona coffee post. Three, eating purple pancakes had “yes, you have to do this” written all over it. They’re purple because of ube, a species of yam––I can’t remember why the syrup is purple:
Purple pancakes for breakfast. Honolua Store #89, Maui, HI. September 2024.
While waiting for my purple pancakes I saw a display card for something I didn’t want to have:
Just couldn’t get behind Spam, despite its popularity. Honolua Store #89, Maui, HI. September 2024.
After breakfast we purchased numerous supplies such as chocolates, coffee, more beer, and other fixin’s and such to encourage us to mostly just stay in place and stare at the ocean.
Molokai occluded by cloud and rainbow. September 2024.
Dawn on our second morning at Kapalua Bay struck clouds delivering a rain shower between us and Molokai, creating a brilliant rainbow. This may be common: I’ll post another instance later in this series.
Close-up of the morning ‘bow. Molokai from Maui, September 2024.
100% Kona coffee. Purchased in Maui, September 2024.
Our first full day on Maui consisted of settling in to a condo (“we need food” we realized). Then, we rendezvoused with one of my few cousins after more than 50 years. While spending the afternoon with them, we wandered an upscale mall. I spied a coffee shop and within, some ground Kona coffee. I needed coffee. I grabbed the package pictured above. At check-out the clerk said, “That will be forty-three dollars” and change. A mixture of shock and avoidance of embarrassment made me extend my credit card, tap the terminal, and commit to one of the most foolish purchases I’ve made in my life. You’ll note the package is only 7 ounces. As in barely-more-than-half-a-pound. Unfortunately, I can’t resist doing the math, and that’s more than $98/pound. Ouch.
I don’t like Kona coffee. I’ve had it off and on (mostly off) over 45 years of fine coffee drinking. I therefore didn’t think too much about buying something that purportedly was a lot less well-positioned on the ladder of quality. Because I absentmindedly left the package in my cousin’s car, I therefore needed coffee still. I purchased this:
Note–only 10% actual Kona coffee in this package. September 2024.
The pound above cost around $12-13. Same amount of ounces. Tasted…not quite as good, but really it wasn’t a three-fold difference. I felt stupid. And there you go.
First sunset, with Molokai in background. September 2024.
Apologies, everyone. I’m going full Grandpa Mode in this one. It needs to be done.
After passing through three airports ranging from nice to delightful (see I Love You Hilo B. Airport), renting a car, and driving around the western lobe of Maui, we negotiated the contactless check-in process to our condo (another post for another day), unpacked, and stepped outside just as the sun set. Apologies for posting yet another sunset photo! It fits and I love ’em!
By the time our first full day in Maui dawned, we had made the decision we wouldn’t be driving around much. That drive from Kahului Airport to our condo at Kapalua Bay had taken nearly an hour. With little of interest in the miles and miles of condos stretching south of us to Lahaina, which itself offered much less after the 2023 fire wiped out half of its center, we realized going to any of the attractions mid-island would mean a two-hour roundtrip drive…every day. Attractions on the eastern part of the island (Haleakala National Park, for example) would be even further. If this had been our first few days in Hawai’i….but they were not.
We did drive back that very first day, however, so I could connect with my cousin whom I had not seen in 40-50 years. I grew up with only three cousins, all girls, who lived many hundreds of miles distant by the time I entered school (especially when they moved to Hawai’i for a few years). I gained a fourth when she was born as I finished high school and college, but the cousin one year older than me passed away about 20 years ago. With only three surviving cousins, and only two I actually knew growing up, seeing my Maui cousin qualified as a Big Deal. We met at the Maui Brewing Company in Kihei. After a delightfully long meal full of laughter, reminiscences, and plenty of beer, we toured the gated community where my cousin’s husband works as head of security. It’s a sweet gig: he works but two or three days each week and rubs shoulders with The Rich. He dropped some names, but I’m not allowed to pass them on to you. Suffice to say, when one of them purchases a home there, they promptly drop about a million to remodel it.
At the end of the afternoon we faced that one-hour drive back. We stopped in Lahaina at a Safeway for supplies, representing the first time I’ve ever seen a wine cellar in a Safeway.
Wine Cellar at Lahaina Safeway. September 2024.
That night the sun dutifully set, and I just as dutifully captured it photographically with twenty shots.
Sunset over palm. Maui, HI, September 2024.
The final dregs of sunset. Maui, HI, September 2024.
Our first night view from our Maui condo (unretouched). September 2024.
[written on January 3rd, but subjected to the Don’t-Post-Anything-After-The-First-Beer rule.]
At the end of September 2024 I mused on boring y’all with 100 Days of Hawaii, my poor-taste humor suggesting I would post every day through the end of the year something about Hawaii, thereby driving away the few visitors who swing by this little neck of the Interweb. Today, 96 days since then, I find 100 days will not be enough owing to my typical lack of focus. (“Oh, look! Something shiny!”) I’ve only posted through our arrival on Maui, barely more than halfway into our trip. And I’ve made myself a mockery for eagerly anticipating the 12 Days of Christmas and all of the writing which would spring to life from my keyboard. (See link for last year’s procession through the Christmastide.) Therefore, on this Tenth Day of Christmas, and just past the turning of the civil calendar from 2024 to 2025, I pause to reflect, to resolve, to anticipate, to evaluate, and to pontificate. I guess I should apologize in advance. I’ll try to return to better stuff soon.
Most obviously, Hawaii remains unfinished. I therefore resolve to complete my reminiscence by the end of January. Given that we lazed out in Maui, did very little, and that I took the same few photographs over and over and over, this likely won’t prove difficult.
I anticipate a medical march through the month. I had a doctor consultation today. Coming up I’ve got a blood draw, a procedure I would name but for the fear I bring to its table, a semi-annual physical, and one or more appointments with those who keep my legs from collapsing. That last item melodramatically addresses ankle and feet issues which would take a lengthy post of little interest to address.
At 70, health becomes ever more preoccupying. I’m trying to change my instinct to live in front of this keyboard when I’m not in the kitchen, the choir loft, or in front of the TV. We’ll see. This intent has been issued many times before, apparently to the void for all the good it did.
I’m ditching Reader’s Horror. It intimidates rather than educates. I think I’ve made my point. Just as with several other things important to me–music reproduction, technology, cars that do what they’re supposed to do–the masses happily settle every day for a lower level of quality, all in the name of convenience. My parents’ and my generation bear some responsibility for thinking TV dinners freed us from cooking; polyester and “wrinkle-free” represented a step forward from cotton; plastic and just-throw-it-away moved us away from the repetitive chores of cleaning our glass and metal containers (can you say disposable diaper?); and gosh darn it, anything digital must be better. This mindset surprisingly (?) led to the demise of institutional journalism and the important publishing houses of my youth. Predictable, maybe, but we’ve tossed too much out with that bathwater: copyeditors, proofreaders, and those who function as guardrails and protect us from the mental cockroaches who crawl out in the absence of intellectual light. Thus sayeth me: When all voices equal each other, rationale thought dies.
I miss my decades-long foray into poetry. In pushing to publish, I’ve lost that time for stewing in my juices which engenders my poetic thoughts. I can’t make this a resolution, but I acknowledge it to myself, if only to start writing down the thoughts when they occur, even if I’m heading for bed! Just this past week I lost two pretty good poems.
I’ve read too few books and too much news. I ditched one digital subscription at the beginning of December, and I’m ditching another in the next week. If it weren’t for the depth of its offerings, I would ditch the New York Times.
There you have it. Nothing earth-shaking. Except, hopefully, for me!
I’m conflicted. I enjoy casual birding, and when I visit Hawai’i and can suddenly see many new birds, I should be thrilled. I did thrill to bright, different birds. Then I learned that virtually every bird I saw had been introduced to the islands in the past 150 years or so. It seemed none of the common ones (the birds hopping around parks and following the tourists around) could claim they were indigenous to any island in Hawaii. Still…they are quite different to commonly spotted birds where I live.
A Saffron Finch. Lili’uokalani Gardens, Hawaii, HI. September 2024.The Common Myna. Outside our hotel, Hilo, HI. September 2024.
The Common Myna appeared everywhere on Hawaii and Maui. It’s native to Asia, but has spread so much it qualifies as “one of the world’s most invasive species,” according to the IUCN Species Survival Commission which listed it on its 100 of the World’s Worst Invasive Species (one of only three birds on it). When we first landed on the Big Island, and I heard this incessant chattering, I thought Starlings had made it to Hawai’i. It’s a noisy bird, and it looks a little bit like a Starling until you get close enough to see the yellow eye patch, the more brown body, and that it moves rapidly on the ground when it wants to.
The Saffron Finch comes from South America. It’s been on the Big Island (Hawaii) only since 1960. We only saw these in the Lili’uokalani Gardens and around our hotel, both of which are on a very small peninsula on the east edge of Hilo, Mokuako.
A Yellow-billed Cardinal. Seriously–see below. Outside our hotel. Hilo, HI. September 2024.
There are three common cardinals in Hawai’i, and none of them are native. One of them isn’t even a cardinal! We saw two: I photographed only the Yellow-billed but we also saw the Red-crested. They both originate in Brazil, but the former has a wider range into Paraguay, Bolivia, Uruguay, and northern Argentina. Thankfully we didn’t see any Northern Cardinals. I see plenty of those at home, and it would have been very depressing. Because I have no photos of the Red-crested, I’m including one from Wikimedia Commons.
My biggest consternation regarding birds wasn’t the Northern Cardinal. It was the onslaught of House Sparrows which assail one in every open restaurant, marketplace, park, and you name it. The fearless critters even hopped into our room in Hilo on several occasions….
“G’morning! Could ya take this peanut-bread-Cheeto whatsit off my bill?” Our first morning waking in Hilo, HI. September 2024.
Though we saw plenty of spotted and zebra doves (both introduced from SE Asia), I failed to take a good photo of one. It remained until we traveled to Maui before I saw a bird endemic to the Hawaiian Islands…
This is the tail end of a family of Nene geese, the state bird of Hawai’i. Maui, September 2024.
Sifting my photos for birds proved beneficial when I tripped over one, and only one, photo of a different group of birds. The Chestnut Munia isn’t native to Hawai’i (of course), but it’s a pretty cool-looking bird nonetheless. In the photo below, the bird on the left is a classic, I’m-sure-it’s-a-Munia example. Moving left to right, birds #2 and #4 appear to be Munias but they’re not supposed to have breasts like that. (Males and females are supposed to look about the same.) Photos of immature birds don’t look like those two. Bird #3? I’ve no idea what that is, but I find it difficult to believe it would just hang out in this group without being one of them.
Chestnut Munia (L) with friends. Kapalua coast, Maui. September 2024.
And in Maui I finally got a photo of one of these long-legged things which had bedeviled me on the Big Island. (Blurry photos? Sure, I’ve got ’em.) I don’t try to identify long-legged birds like this because they are so diverse and so similar. I don’t even know if this one is the same species as the ones which ran around on the rocky coasts of Hilo Bay.
Hello Mr. Long Legs. I’ll ID you one day. Kapalua coast, Maui. September 2024.
I would be remiss not to include a photo like the one below. Chickens. Yes, chickens. They’re not exactly everywhere but they’re darn common running around many areas where you wouldn’t expect to see them. They apparently are “wild” in the sense they don’t go to a coop and get fed by humans. They hang around the cities and towns, though, so…what is “wild” anyway?
The parking lot outside the Maui Aquarium. I think this guy met me ten minutes later at the nearby gas station. Maui, September 2024.
Touchdown! Honolulu, Oahu, HI. Technically not on Hawaiian soil yet. September 2024.
Just over 49 hours after our plane took off from Maui Monday morning, I’m sitting here trying to make sense of it all. Not the time there. That’s easy: it delivered in ways unanticipated, surprised almost hourly, relaxed me more than has occurred in years (decades?), and sated our senses. Translating to TikTok language, it was “awesome.” No, that’s not it. The sense I’m searching for has to do with much more than that.
I’m 70. When I marked my 37th birthday I had only the barest of inklings that less than two weeks later my marriage would end. I’d been working on sprucing up our former house, a recent rental being prepped for sale, and I looked forward to a vacation to Honolulu, Hawaii, in about a month’s time. I learned my life would take a different course about 10 days after my birthday. A couple of weeks after that, my soon-to-be-legally-ex-wife convinced me to cough up my travel vouchers for her close friend so that they could go to Hawaii. (I stubbornly had thought I would still go: traveling in a chilly, no, frosty silence on the plane and finding separate lodgings. I guess I’m thankful she convinced me not to.) She enjoyed Hawaii, I had a hollow experience at a regional blues festival. Don’t read into this too much. She wasn’t a horrible person, just a helluva lot more pragmatic than I. Many signs pointed to the ultimate demise of our marriage. I just didn’t want to acknowledge them.
This experience plus a relocation to the Eastern US Coast put Hawaii into a “maybe someday” category. I watched as my brother and his family visited time and again, including the year of my second marriage in 1995. After five, ten years, it seemed everyone had been to Hawaii but me. That was unfortunate, because then my contrarian nature kicked in. I’ve been contrarian since childhood. I didn’t attend popular movies precisely because they were popular. Everyone’s going to Hawaii? Well, not me!
My new wife wanted to go, though. A financial impossibility by the time we moved to the West Coast, it continued to be so after we returned to the East Coast. By the time we maybe could have afforded it, my job precluded it. Then I retired at the end of 2019, and 2020 being our 25th anniversary, we set our sights on Hawaii. But 2020 wasn’t kind to us or anyone else. We spent that Silver Anniversary eating take-out pizza and watching TV. Sad. As we emerged from Pandemonia, I studiously ignored the idea we could go to Hawaii. Then 2024 arrived. Our mantra became, “just book the trip.” Instead of equivocating about a possible trip, just figure out if you can afford it and if you can, book it! We did. A few logistical glitches will be discussed in future entries, maybe, but we flew there as planned, and actually stayed an extra day due to a bit of poor planning on my part.
Those weren’t my only issues with traveling to Hawaii. If we’d consummated a trip to Puerto Rico in February 2022, I would have resisted Hawaii. But PR had smarter, more restrictive Covid protocols than the mainland US, and that year I doubted we could meet them given the logistics of a Covid testing thing. We approached 2024 and its mantra of “just book the trip” with the knowledge that this year marked the 30th since we met, and the threshold of our 30th anniversary in 2025. So I came through: I booked a European river cruise for 2025 and booked Hawaii for this year.
At 70 I’ve had more than 60 years of thinking Hawaii is a lush, tropical chain of islands. It’s not–not the lushness part. The Trade Winds blow SE to NW which coincidentally aligns with the main islands of Hawaii. The Big Island takes the first shot of those winds and their weather. The east side of the island, anchored by Hilo, catches constant fog/mist and gentle rains. It measures its rain in feet-per-year. To a lesser extent, this pattern extends to the other islands. The east coasts catch rain, the rest of the island is semi-arid grasslands ranging from a lush grassiness to a dry volcanic scabland I knew well from growing up in eastern Washington State. Oddly (to me), the destination vacation spots are on those semi-arid sides of the islands.
Thankfully, I’ve harbored a strong desire to go to the Big Island since the 1970s when I knew Betty Nahoopii as a young reporter in Monroe, WA. She and her husband organized trips to the Big Island, and she gushed about all the amazing and weird stuff one could see there. This was the island I had to visit. Here’s where the Fates kicked in. One of my cousins lives on Maui. I planned to visit her and that island for a few days, then we would shuttle over to Hawaii and spend a week there. (“We’ll get a taste of Maui, four or five days, and then we’ll relax into the Big Island,” I said.) When I found out I couldn’t fly directly out of Hilo to the mainland (thanks, Southwest), I begrudged the day we would lose to fly to Honolulu and then overnight there to catch the next morning’s flight to the mainland. Therefore, I flipped the trip around because I could fly directly out of Kahului, Maui. We were tethered to Southwest because of all the points I built up as a consultant over the Twenty-teens. Another stroke of fortuitous luck: Southwest only flew into Hilo–not Kona. Virtually every other airline flies into the dry side of the island where Kona is located. For a week, therefore, we got a true tropical experience. Our room:
Our room at the Grand Naniloa. All drapes pull fully back, and the sliders provide a wraparound experience on the lanai. Hilo, Hawaii, Hawaii. September 2024.
Our definition of “fortuitous” lies in spending most of a week in an established city on the biggest island of the archipelago. We drove to the west side of the island and Kona on our final full day on the island. Kona proffers the worst of resort-oriented vacationing. We could discern no true center to the “city” and all that seemed to be there was hillsides covered by vacation houses and condos, marinas full of boats, and more American Standard Fare shopping centers in a few square miles than we saw in almost all of Hilo. A semi-pathetic National Historic Park offered the only draw for us. We sweltered in the dry heat, gassed the car, and beat a quick retreat to the east side of the island.
Maui brought the opposite, in the sense we found ourselves in a copy of Kona. After flying in around 4:30 p.m. on a Tuesday, I discovered Google Nav hadn’t lied. We were in for a one-hour drive to our condo on the extreme north end of the resort coast of the western, resort area of the island. It resembles Kona in many ways, though a bit more lush. We had to drive an hour back the very next day to meet my cousin and her husband for lunch the next day. Returning from that delightful reconnection with her (after 50-ish years!), we resolved to hang out on the quiet resort coast of Kapalua and so we did.
I know this: “Hawaii” means a different thing to the large majority of people who aren’t us. Ocean stuff? We’re not going to snorkel, dive, sunbathe, surf, fish, jet ski, kayak, or anything else related to any strenuous activity. We’re going to look at it, hike along it, sit on the beach and marvel at it, poke into tidepools if allowed, and if none of that works out, we’ll drive along it and take photos from on high. Our idea of a vacation doesn’t extend to reserving a pickleball/tennis court, doesn’t include (usually) any guided tour, doesn’t include a helicopter ride into a volcano, and sure doesn’t get defined as “hanging out at the pool under a cabana for a week while waiters bring us drinks.” We’re not going to spend all our time fixing our own meals in a condo.
What does Hawaii and by extension “vacation” mean to us? Stay tuned. I’ve not decide how to present everything, but I know that I’ve got about 750 photos to back it up! Here’s one:
Our view looking down from our wrap-around balcony at the Grand Naniloa Hotel, Hilo, HI. September 2024.
all the voices in my head 