I have a close friend who’s attuned much more than I to weather and the physical world. As friendships go (at least the good, genuine ones), we mentor each other in an informal way. He recently did so without his knowledge. He habitually witnesses the rising and setting of the sun when he can. We both live where trees and ridges obscure those times of day. Therefore this mostly occurs when he relaxes oceanside at a family retreat, and he can walk out on the dock where an unobstructed view affords him an opportunity to watch and photograph the sun’s coming and going.
In retirement I’ve developed a habit of waking at pre-dawn when skies lighten. Nevertheless, I surprised myself when I still woke at that time our first morning in Hilo, despite having flown west for three time zones the previous day. “I’m going to watch and photograph the sunrise, just like my bud,” I thought. Perhaps there was a bit of snark in that, but by the time we left a week later, the snark had fled while the compulsion remained. The day I woke precisely at dawn, I thought, “Yikes! I’ve got to get out there!” I carried the habit throughout the trip, even to the last morning of it when we rose in Phoenix.
Anyway, here’s our first sunrise in Hilo.
Sunrise in Hilo, looking across Reeds Bay (and a bit of Kuhio Bay). September 2024.
I’ve but three Hawaiian airports under my belt, so take this statement with several grains of salt: a first-timer’s arrival to Hawai’i could scarcely be better than passing through the Hilo International Airport. Smaller airports does not always mean better: a truly uninspired one exists in my hometown of Spokane. Most exist as tiny copies of the Big Boys. That’s what makes Hilo’s such a refreshing surprise.
An exit from Hilo International Airport. September 2024.
Unlike any other airport I’ve been in, Hilo’s opens to the air…everywhere. Call it The Lanai Effect. On the concourse level most walls rise to railing height only. The arrival/departure level echoes the effect. Large doorways punctuate the building so frequently, one becomes hard put not to claim the walls punctuate the openness. Green steel roofs the low-slung building and covers the walkways. It reminded me of photos I’ve seen of other tropical buildings, particularly those serving some kind of transportation need: freight depots in the Amazon; a train station in the Congo; tropical open-air markets in a cruise ship’s port of call.
Hilo International Airport as seen from “car rental row” across the street. September 2024.
Hilo’s airport boasts the most comfortable waiting area seats this road warrior has ever seen, similar to someone’s living room (note coffee and end tables):
General waiting area, Hilo International Airport (ITO). September, 2024.Close-up of chairs in general waiting area at Hilo airport (post-TSA). September 2024.
I know, I know: not all airports could work this way. I’m just happy this one does.
As recounted here a few days ago, I balanced a 33-year-old slight this past month by traveling for nearly two weeks to Hawaii. Despite not being able to use my primary camera for most of our time on Maui, my smartphone took up the slack and I arrived home with over 750 photos. Now gather around while Grandpa adjusts the slide carousels just so and we’ll have a nice travelogue for the next couple hours.
No, just kidding. That’s what MY grandfather would’ve done. We would’ve been semi-bored because 30% of the photos were too dark to make out details, but mostly because Grandpa would feel the need to tell histories of many of the things we were trying to make out on the silver-encrusted screen–said histories sometimes being personal tales of the trip which really weren’t very interesting. “Now this is where we stayed in a really nice hotel. I don’t have a photo of that, but this bush caught our eye every morning when we left the hotel. It’s a rose-scented yackenberry–what, dear? It’s not? Well, then what is it?”
Occasionally we could have some fun by asking about weird things in the photos which he’d never noticed, or hooting when–despite all of his pre-show attention to detail–an occasional slide would be sideways and he would bravely carry on with the narrative despite his audience all having their heads at a 90º angle. The laughter would be uncontrollable if his photo also seemed near-unintelligibly dark while he droned on about what we couldn’t see.
Yet, a 10-to-14-day narrative a la our trip to Michigan and Ohio last year (starting here) seems too short–and as I reacquaint myself with last year’s travelogue–too much like Grandpa’s endless dronings in the guise of an interesting travel lecture. Instead, I’ll piecemeal it. Okay?
“Now after we overnighted in Las Vegas due to the inconvenient schedule of Southwest Airlines for Hawaii-bound East Coasters, we changed planes in Honolulu and caught our first glimpse of the Big Island when we flew by about four in the afternoon…oh, me…how did that happen?”
“You can’t really tell because it’s so dark, but…” The NW coast of Hawai’i, HI. 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.
Lexington, KY’s McConnell Springs Park. July 2014.
Sticking with the ten years ago thing, I saw this photo. It’s unretouched (though cropped). It really is that green. McConnell Springs is the neatest little park, barely one square mile if I recall properly. European settlers were here, damming a spring to power a mill. The park sits on the edge of an industrial park hemmed in by railroad tracks on the other side with residential developments beyond that. Yet inside the densely forested park you feel a calmness as you’re transported back to another century.
We attended a wedding over the weekend in our old haunts around Philly. Our first ‘historic’ inn left a lot to be desired, but this one really delivered. Added plus: stupendous restaurant just to the right of this photo.
TECO power plant exhaust stacks reflect on the manatee-filled waters near Apollo Beach near Tampa. March 2024.
Near Tampa, the Tampa Electric Company (TECO) has what appears to be a waste-to-energy power plant near Apollo Beach. It discharges warm water into a man-made cut connecting to Tampa Bay. During the cooler winter months, manatees crowd into this cut to stay warm. TECO has built and supports a manatee-viewing area of boardwalks and elevated viewing platforms. It’s easy to get to, easy to walk around, and well-developed (not just a platform but hundreds of feet of boardwalk). While there one also can see shorebirds and many kinds of fish.
Manatees with shark. TECO Manatee Viewing Center. March 2024.Immature White Ibis at TECO Manatee Viewing Center. March 2024.I thought these were tarpon, but I’m feeling insecure about that. The distortion of the water is making it difficult to tell. These particular fish were about three feet long. There were bigger ones. TECO Manatee Viewing Center. March 2024.The stars of the area are the manatees, of course. TECO Manatee Viewing Center. March 2024.
View from Fort Macon State Park, Emerald Isle, NC. September 2023.
As mentioned in a post on Monday, last week I began an unusual period of travel: all of it by someone else, unless you count this day-trip to coastal waters last Friday. The above contradicts the National Weather Service’s forecast of partly sunny, but temps were in the 70’s, and it wasn’t raining. I would have traded Thursday’s sunny weather, but it permitted a nice walk around Lake Lynn where we espied turtles, ducks, geese, more turtles, still more turtles, and a couple of hunting herons:
Great blue heron with turtle at Lake Lynn, Raleigh, NC. September 2023.
That afternoon my good buddy received his wish, and we visited the Duke University Store to purchase swag. While there we took a quick peek at the chapel:
Duke University Chapel. September 2023.
The cones and barriers in the photo were courtesy of the setup for Game Day, a Saturday morning TV show focused on college football–according to my friend since I do not follow any sport except baseball. The resemblance to construction fit right in with all the real construction which was occurring nearby.
Now we entertain my brother and watch post-season baseball. Good times.
[Note to CIMPLE: all photos taken with Google Pixel 6 Pro. Top two edited with Faststone. Last one not edited.]
Small, shriveled golden oyster mushrooms. September 2023.
When I converted an old, seldom-used blog into this one, I envisioned a writing outlet and ‘daily’ blog combination. After all, I’d just canceled Facebook for reasons too obvious and previously stated. I figured my need to communicate, to shout into the gale winds of social media would inevitably fill this site up with lots and lots of pithy writing punctuating my daily doin’s. It’s now time to admit something about getting older I had witnessed but not from this side of the divide, so to speak: that driving urge to make something happen and accomplish something fades. Some of this is good. Recently I’ve reflected on my typical mindset four years ago when I juggled weekly trips across the continent to San Diego and Seattle from my Raleigh home, monthly visits to attend to my ailing mother in Spokane, and to arrange her final rites in October. (I ended it all with an audit performed in Toronto…in rainy November weather. Yay.) I barely recognize the person who kept multiple itineraries in his head, who could tell you which airports had which kiosks at which intervals, who had a set and efficient routine for unpacking and packing a suitcase, who parleyed sarcastic cynicism into a business persona, and who grabbed beers and food as time allowed. I wish I could convey the inner pressure which led others to give me wide berth at times, but which seemed to be crucial to my survival. But now…
Hard to thrill, Nothing really moves me anymore.
from “Hard To Thrill” by Eric Clapton/John Mayer, performed by Clapton & J.J. Cale on The Road To Escondido
When Covid partnered with retirement to give me a crash course in inactivity, I reverted to a boyhood prototype: read; pursue an idea as it blossomed; eat; drink; repeat. But don’t call me lazy. I bristle at being called lazy. “Inside my head I’m more active than you’ll ever be,” I think. (We’ll leave to another day what steps I took to slow down and/or turn off the voices in my head.) I learned early that giving voice to my stream of consciousness at speed guaranteed a fairly quick response: “oh god, would you PLEASE JUST SHUT UP!” (Well, I somewhat learned it. I’ve received refresher courses throughout the ensuing 50 years.) Example from a coastal drive during this past week’s visit from a lifelong friend: “There’s a Free Will Baptist Church…not to be confused with a movie about orcas…and definitely Free Willy shouldn’t be confused with that series of pornographic films.” I think I saw heads spin in the car. Did I mention I liked Robin Williams because he delivered comedy at a speed I could appreciate?
All of this by way of explaining my consternation at noting only three or four posts in the past six weeks. Remove the writer’s conceit of a Virtual Vacation and I’ve posted little in the past three or four months. No promises, but I’m headed into a (slightly) more optimistic future in October. In mid-month I’m looking at two periods in the month which hold a dozen days of solitude–a gift to a loner like me.
Our shriveled photo at the top represents a failure at growing a beautiful blooming of golden oyster mushrooms. I was promised a gorgeous cluster, maybe two or three from a kit I purchased in early August. It should have looked like this…ah but that would be stealing someone else’s photo. Let’s just say it would be ten times bigger than the clump in the photo above.
Instead, nothing happened within the 10-14 days it should have. I gifted a friend with the same kind of mushroom kit, and he started a week ahead of me. He didn’t reach harvest until about day 19 or 20, so I held on. About three weeks in, I finally got some growth where it shouldn’t have occurred and it consisted of two distinct clusters which both looked like the picture at the top of this post. It’s an accurate symbol of my shriveled hopes these days. The vendor came through though and sent me a new block which arrived Friday. I started it Sunday, and noted I had not followed instructions–imagine that. This time I made the required shallow incision in the mycelium-impregnated starter block as specified. Stay tuned.
It’s possible that the advent of Oktoberfest with its namesake beer has contributed to some of the lassitude I feel. Or…others…. I’m still polishing off some representatives from the Michigan trip in July. (Though not representative of the state: it’s where I found North Coast Brewing’s Old Rasputin, an imperial stout that drinks like a cross between beer, chocolate, and coffee, all without any additions. Good stuff, but potent. Two of these babies and you’re more than halfway through a typical six-pack.)
The glass is mightier than the sword…particularly when the glasses gang up on the pen.
September saw a few happenings. We got to know our new steel steed, Percy Pilcher:
Percy Pilcher, aviator extraordinaire!
We set out at the end of August to replace Mr. Lincoln, a 2015 Lincoln MKC and a beautiful realization of automotive vision, but who had become a bit outdated, frustrating, and tired after eight years. “A hybrid, dear,” I told my wife. “That’s what we need. And probably a minivan, though I’m loath to admit those words. We need the cargo room.” We went shopping. Hybrid Toyota Sierras would be available six to eight months–if we pre-ordered. Chrysler Pacificas looked cheap, even at the so-called high end of the model spectrum. The others were DOA, and so…we headed back to the Lincoln dealership where we were treated like returning royalty. No hybrid Aviators? There’s a familiar song. A ‘pre-owned’ model? (Hmm. Weren’t those called “used” not long ago? I think I’m differently opinionated!) Sure. And that’s how we wound up with a current-year Aviator which was returned after five months because the purchasers just loved the vehicle they had traded in, so they bought another one and used this one to cover the cost. Their disappointment was our gain. We bought a vehicle with less than one year’s mileage on it, looks sharp, has all the features we wanted, and…it’s a Lincoln. When I woke up from the euphoria, though, I realized we had purchased another gas combustion engine and that it had 25% worse gas mileage than what we had traded in! Ah, no matter. For now Percy is our new Aviator. Why Percy? Because Percy Pilcher, a relative for sure–there aren’t many Pilchers in the world–achieved quite a bit of notoriety as an inventor and aviator, and likely would’ve bested the Wright brothers at the first to fly a heavier-than-air aircraft if he hadn’t been killed right before attempting it. If you click through to that link, the photograph of him looks similar to my grandfather, the Rev. Howard B. Pilcher, enough that he could’ve been a cousin. I’ve not done much with genealogy, so I’ve no idea how close the relationship is.
Tuesday marked the beginning of a month of travel, both us and others. Or more specifically, both my wife and others. I’m not going anywhere. In my teen years I became acquainted with a guy who later became a good and close friend. Throughout junior and senior high I knew who he was, saw him in groups, but not until I dropped out of college after my freshman year in 1973 did I start working at a Spokane hospital where he also worked. We started hanging out, and because I had become just a little more “normal” we connected. Though diametrically different, we became friends. He was the best man at my first wedding in 1983. We fell into and out of touch, but by 1990 we had renewed it for good. I moved away, and he served in the wedding party for my second wedding. (It was only fair. I participated in multiple weddings for him. Perhaps I’ll tell that tale later.) This past week represented the second time he visited us in Raleigh; the first occurred only because he had followed a woman to Florida in 2009. Had that not happened….but that’s also another story.
This week my brother visits for the first time in over a year. When he leaves a week later, one of my wife’s triplet sisters drops in the next day to pick up my wife and continue to Florida where she (my sister-in-law, not my wife) will look for her retirement home. When that’s done my wife and I will enjoy a whole seven days all by ourselves before she takes off again with a group of friends called The Biker Chicks (though my wife has never ridden a hog or any other type of motorcycle that I am aware of). Finally, as October bows itself out with Hallowe’en, and All Saints and All Souls ushers us into November, I will settle into a sedate period of enjoying my life with my wife. I really don’t need much else. She lets me be to sit here and write these screeds, matches me drink for drink and recipe for recipe, creates handcrafted art in a panoply of media, and joins me in a love of good video, good music, and good times.
What could be better? It’s why I sometimes don’t post here regularly. I’m having too much fun.
all the voices in my head 