Time to leave, and though we hated for the vacation to end, we were ready to go. We had saved up a couple of last yogurts that we wolfed down on the balcony, said goodbye to the mongooses and the mynas, packed up our packs, and then left room 4051 one last time. There wasn’t a microwave we could leave our cash in, but we’d had a great time and the room had stood up to us well. I don’t think that refrigerator is going to forget us for a while, we pushed that thing.
One last walk up the Museum Walkway (yay!) and checked out at the main desk. No unforeseen charges, and we were out of there pretty quickly. Up the drive, cut over on Maintenance Road, and out the Southern entrance, back to Queen K Highway South.
We didn’t get lost returning Hector to the National Car Rental place, and were out of there and waiting for the shuttle bus in a few minutes. Our blue Hyundai Elantra had behaved excellently, getting us up and down a lot of mountains with no drama and returning great mileage, which was good seeing the astronomical gas prices in Hawaiʻi. There were a few small aggravating things it did, and I don’t think this would be a good car for us normally, but it was fine for the vacation and had been our second (third?) home for the week.
The shuttle got us quickly to the Hawaiian Airlines terminal (there are just two terminals at the charming Kona Airport), and we got our boarding passes and got the baggage weighed and tagged pretty quickly. One oddity was that after getting the baggage tagged we had to take it over to the agricultural inspection station … people are not allowed to bring plants or animals back to the mainland from Hawaiʻi. But that went pretty well too. The official there said, “Do you have any plants or animals in the baggage you’re checking?” We said no. He said, “OK, put it on the belt!”
Well gee, it was pretty much what you’d expect after that. We had gotten there a bit early so we’d have no pressure, and had time to hang out in their air conditioned café for one last Kua Bay before we took off. Said one last farewell to the Big Island but we were out of there and over the water pretty quickly. The short flight to Honolulu was uneventful, but in the bigger airport there was a delay in getting the Wiki Wiki bus over to the right terminal ( we should have walked).
Found a restaurant over there and had a nice, mellow meal with some beer from the Waikiki Brewing Company. And then the Boston flight was delayed a bit because the incoming Boston plane hadn’t yet arrived, and when it did it needed to get prepped for the return trip. But we were back in the air sometime in early afternoon, leaving the islands behind.
This flight seemed to take longer and/or be more of a pain than the flight there had been. We were not leaving for a wonderful vacation, we were returning. And perhaps I shouldn’t have had any carbonated drinks in the airport … I was feeling nauseous most of the way back. I finished my thriller and so had to watch a couple of movies, which were interesting but watching a movie on a plane is a bit tedious.
It was dark by the time we made landfall in Southern California. I tried to get a little sleep on the plane but this wasn’t working. By the time we made it back East and circled over the Atlantic (which looked more like the Pacific than you’d think), I was pretty tired. But we were back and got our suitcases pretty quickly too and then stood in the cab line in the Saturday morning sun. It was about 6:30 by then.
Dave got one cab and we got another, and were back home pretty soon. The cab driver commented that I had to mow the lawn.
So how to sum up? As some time has passed since the trip, I’ve realized that I’m still sorting out my impressions. Travel to an exotic place was not new to us, but still this experience was so different in so many ways that it will take me some time to make sense of it. People ask me, “How was it?” And I find it hard to answer that concisely. I guess I should say, “It was like being on an island, thousands of miles away from anywhere else.”
No comments:
Post a Comment