When we got in the night before, our message light had been blinking. I checked it and it was Hank at the Hilton Grand Vacations concierge desk telling me we’d missed our presentation! The story was that part of the deal that allowed us to get the great price for the Resort that we did, was that Sarah and I would have to sit through a 2-hour sales presentation. OK, we could do that. After much confusion, this was scheduled for Monday afternoon. But at the last minute they’d apparently changed it to Sunday afternoon at the same time and we’d not noticed that change (even when we checked in, the guy at the desk had told us “Monday” … oh well). They emailed me too about us being delinquent and possibly forfeiting our rate, and I replied before going to bed.
And then the phone rang at 7:10AM and it was them again, wanting to reschedule us. It was just a big mixup. They woke Dave from a sound sleep, but I was just as glad to get this rescheduled early so we could plan the day. We set it up for 1:30 that afternoon.
So that meant we could do a Kohala or Kona beach in the morning, get back in time to shower the salt and sand off and eat lunch, and then we two would head on over while Dave chilled. So what beach?
The problem is that we’re not beach people. The Kohala coast has several beaches that are consistently listed among the best in the world. But the rating of “best” may mean it’s not for us. It generally means lots of open sand sloping gently into the water and pretty calm seas for swimming, or if there are waves, they’re gentle and fit for boogie-boarding. We like beaches with places to sit in the shade and interesting swimming, though we were aware that these beaches fronted on, and were exposed to, the wide Pacific. And you could see Japan out there (or a sequence of tsunamis) if you looked hard enough.
We also wanted a beach where you could snorkel, and we’d brought masks, fins, and snorkels, seeing that rental prices were outrageous. But when a beach was rated “good for snorkeling” they meant “good” for people who were experienced snorkelers and wanted to spend the day doing it. We just wanted to get our feet wet, figuratively.
Anyway, what appealed to me on reading about beaches was the Old Kona Airport, about 25 miles South of our Resort on the South Kona coast. Believe it or not, this was the Old Kona Airport … but it was not big enough for modern jet-liners and so was closed in 1970. It’s now a State Recreation Area and still features the old runway. It fronts on the beach and the descriptions of it indicated that this might be the beach for us. And it was, kind of.
Did our morning routine of taking turns in the bathroom and shower and Sarah making us each a cup of coffee (by making hot water in the little room coffee maker and using the press she’d brought with the coffee we picked up Saturday). Then we packed up all our snorkeling and beach gear, slathered on the sunscreen, and we were out of there, on another hot morning trek down the Museum Walkway. On a few occasions (can’t remember if we did it that morning), we exited the walkway and went cross-country, over the meandering Resort paths. This was a little more direct, but still painfully, ridiculously inconvenient. And this meant we were exposed to the hot sun and then had to climb their huge stairway at the end of it to get up to the lobby and out of the Resort. I think they really want you to stay there and spend more money.
Finally made it to the car, though Dave threatened to fall on a lady in a wheelchair. A comedy routine we were forced to go through every morning was getting through the gate out of the parking lot. You were supposed to insert your room key into the slot and remove it quickly, and the gate would lift open for you. At least, that’s what the sign said. A couple of times we did it in one shot, but sometimes it took more sticking the card in and pulling it out and then waiting for the mechanism to work. Our record was 9 tries. And everyone else entering and leaving went through the same thing! Sometimes this built up quite a line of impatient people who just wanted to get the fuck out of there and groaned at every rejection by the gate.
Speaking of getting out of there, it’s a painfully long drive out to the highway past 25 MPH signs and lots of stop signs and speed bumps. This main route out to the South took us past the incredibly tony Queen’s Marketplace, and they were apparently thinking that that’s where we really wanted to go. They had lots of canted speed bumps, trying to steer us in there. It wasn’t until a bit later that we discovered “Maintenance Road,” a much quicker way out of the oppressive Resort complex.
Turned onto Queen K Highway (route 19) and motored on down past the (new) Kona Airport and into the town of Kailua-Kona. It was another beautiful blue day with a cloud cover created by Mauna Loa cloaking the upper slopes and top of Hualālai. Turned down the road past another tony mall towards the old airport, past the Little League fields, and then there we were in an old and rusty State Park, motoring a few hundred yards down the old runway to the end of the beach that was supposed to have good snorkeling.
BUT … it didn’t take us long to realize there would be no snorkeling that morning. The tide was out, and the very stiff wind was onshore, which is a bit unusual for the leeward side (the National Weather Service called it an “inverse trade wind”). The breakers were crashing in over the lava and coral, with enough force that even a hundred yards after they first smashed into the rock, by the time the water got to the tide pools and hollows between huge lava boulders in front of us, it was still gushing in with a force that would knock you over. We maybe could have gone to the other end of the beach and been faced with a few less rocks, but even so the swimming would not have been safe.
So we were a little disappointed, but not really! It was so, so beautiful. Where the waves broke they caught the sun and lit up into a rainbow of turquoise, white, blue, and green. The black rocks were impossibly jagged and the sand was coarse and shifted incredibly with every wave. As was apparent often, we realized how young and ephemeral this landscape was. The wind was strong and steady, howling so much we had a hard time hearing anything but the crashing of the waves. There was shade from a variety of funny little trees, and there were very few people. At our end of the beach we saw three in the whole time we were there, one walking three funny dogs.
We took turns doing a little wading, wearing water shoes. I was perhaps most daring, finding a spot between several boulders where the water was sometimes just up to my knees, but sometimes up to my shoulders when a breaker overflowed the rocks between me and the sea. I stood sideways to the incoming waves, and with many of them I had to counter with a solid shoulder check when they burst into my little cove, or else they would have knocked me off my feet. As I said, the sand was constantly shifting and a couple of times I did lose my footing, and had to hurry to get back in position for the next wave. The water was salty, warm, and clean. But after a bit I figured I’d pressed my luck enough and got back out. All it would have taken was one really huge wave to smash me onto the rocks, which would not have been fun.
We all had a good amount of sunscreen on, but when we were in the sun we could feel our skin crisping. We hung out in the shade and just watched the waves, breaking along down the coast to the South. And we took turns exploring around the funky cove and the small rocky areas behind it, where there were some native burial plots.
This was a grand time, but after a while we knew we had to get back. No idea how long we would have stayed there otherwise. We walked over to the bathhouse near where we had parked and tried to wash the sand and salt off in their outside showers, then got back in the car and headed down the runway and then back up the coast to Kohala. Not too long a drive up to the Resort, taking note of a gas station and store we might stop at the next day.
Back to the room, had a beer or two and a PB&J sandwich (we had gotten guava jelly instead of our normal apple … none of that to be found in the store). And then Sarah and I headed back up the blessed Museum Walkway to the car so we could drive up to King’s Land for the sales presentation. Got there a bit early and had time to hang at their poolside bar for a bit and have another beer. This was a bit more like the kind of Resort we like, but just a bit. And then…
Well, this was quite a sales presentation and it seemed to go on for a couple of weeks, not just a couple of hours, even though we tried to enjoy it. We’d thought it would be a bunch of people in a room listening to a presentation, and then they’d load us onto a bus and take us around the Resort to show us the golf courses. And we knew we weren’t going to sign or buy anything. But they persisted.
We were greeted by Nicholas, a 20-something tall blonde guy who was very good at this, and he made it personal. We enjoyed talking to him about what we had liked so far about the trip and what our situation in life was r.e. travel. And then he very skillfully turned this around and used all of the information we’d given him (and often our very words) to try to convince us to subscribe to a “points” program with Hilton Grand Vacations. This would allow us to book Hilton properties all over the world and would also enable us to book unused inventory for quick, cheap vacations.
The issue was that our idea of a vacation (go places and drive around and see things and stay in cheap hotels because we wouldn’t be spending much time in the room) was antithetical to their idea of what people wanted in a vacation: luxury, a beautiful room in a Resort, going to one place and staying there. Nicholas took us to see one of their suites, which was nice. Sarah had a good question for him, “What if we don’t like the artwork?” This exposed the fallacy that they touted this as an “equity” arrangement, but actually all we would own would be the right to stay in one of these places, not the actual place. This was not the kind of equity we would pay money for.
They brought us back into the little room and then the closer, Maria, came in and really turned up the hard sell. It was only when I had the following exchange with her that she realized she was wasting her time.
- Me: The only way I would buy a deal like this is if a friend of mine said he recommended it.
- Maria: Do you have any friends who are Hilton Grand Vacation members?
- Me: No.
- Maria: Then that could never happen. How about if I get you recommendations from people who are members?
- Me: I wouldn’t believe them, they don’t know me.
- Maria: OK, we’re done here!
And then they ushered us into another big room and told us that somebody would be by soon to give us the prizes we had won (or something like that). What they meant by “prizes” was a certificate for a bunch of Hilton Honors Points and one for a refund for a Hilton Honors stay. This was all part of the package we’d purchased, but a check on my phone showed that we’d already been there well over two hours and I was getting impatient.
So, as Sarah says, I started to act like a distracted toddler, which seemed to work. I wasn’t going to just sit patiently at that desk, I got up and tried all the doors in the room, logged onto the computer they had set up over in a corner, got cups of water from their machine, and listened in on other people’s conversations. What they wanted to do by making us sit and wait was soften us up for one last hard sell. They wanted Sarah or me to turn to the other and say, “You know honey, we really do deserve a spot in paradise, let’s reconsider this!” Wasn’t happening.
I was just about to start rearranging the furniture (I had sketched out mentally how to do it), when finally a person showed up and gave us our certificates. I think they’d realized that the best thing for their operation was to get odd ducks like us out of there as soon as possible. Yeah, we could have told them that. We bid them a fond adieu, and wasted no time getting back to the Ocean Tower. And there was still plenty of time left in the afternoon!
We had no energy to go anywhere else though (we’d already done the long walk to the car twice that day). Dave had had time to prowl around most of the Resort while we were gone. And we had been stymied that morning in giving our snorkeling gear a run. And so we decided to try it out in the Resort’s lagoon.
As I say, most of the people in the Resort did not leave the environs. And the designers had carved an artificial lagoon into the middle of the campus, letting out into the little cove they fronted on, that suddenly became the Pacific. So the lagoon was basically part of the sea, but we soon discovered that it was also fed by several outlets of fresh water … you could see and feel the cold, fresh water sitting over the warmer salt water. I’m sure that without the influx of fresh water, forcing the lagoon to flow outwards to the cove, it soon would have gotten a lot dirtier and cloudier than it was. Even so, it was pretty dirty, mostly shallow, and not really a good place to swim or snorkel. But we gave it a good shot and had a grand time.
Sarah pretty quickly soured on snorkeling … she could not really fit the mouthpiece snugly into her mouth. Dave and I got the new gear working pretty quickly (including the underwater camera), and explored the lagoon. I even went outside it a bit, but this was not much fun either, since everything was so shallow and the waves were washing in and out, forcing me to struggle to stay where it was barely deep enough to swim.
There were a good number of fish in the lagoon, they were fun to see and follow. There were also several green sea turtles there, oblivious to the fact that they’re endangered. We were supposed to stay clear of them and not bother them, but they wanted to get close enough to us to see if we had any tasty algae for them. And jeez, in that lagoon we could feel the algae growing on us. Soon we were done. That was a fun thing to say you’d done, though we don’t plan to do it again any time soon.
We walked further South, into the depths of the Resort, and saw their dolphin pool. You have to think that those cetaceans weren’t having a lot of fun, being locked into that little pool. Sarah then headed back to the room with the gear, but Dave and I took a quick tour around the rest of the Resort. We saw their other huge pool, that had what looked like a better slide, a pool volleyball court, and was spanned by a rope bridge. Might be worth trying it out if we had time. We also saw the Hilton Waikoloa luau court (which looked pretty gruesome), and their flamingo and tortoise enclosures, which were a little jarring.
And then we were at the beginning of the boat canal and there was the boat, just boarding! We weren’t about to miss this opportunity and we climbed on board, just like clueless tourists. It was kind of fun, even though this wasn’t like a real boat ride; the boat is on a track and the skipper’s duties were basically to turn the propulsion on or off, and to help people on or off when we stopped at a dock. Dave and I planned that one of us would distract or block the skipper when he was on a dock, and the other would throw off the hawser and gun it, and then we could take the boat into the open ocean. But this was just a pipe dream.
Finally landed at the other end of the canal, the Boat Landing Grill, which had opened for lunch but seemed totally unappealing. We went upstairs and showered off the slime and the salt, and then had to sit out on the balcony, watch the sunset, and think about what *did* seem appealing for dinner. Boy, this was a tough life, and by that point we were entirely on vacation time.
As I say, we had had it with traveling anywhere that day, and so our choices were limited to the in-Resort options. They have an Italian restaurant in the middle of the Museum Walkway, but we’d checked out their prices and they were outrageous, probably for not-the-finest food either. We didn’t want to go back all the way to the other end of the Resort for their other outrageously high-priced restaurant. And so we settled on going back to the Kona Tap Room, where we’d been Friday night.
And we had a fine time there! We’d missed their karaoke night on Sunday (thank Dog), and they had two guys doing “Hawaiian Music,” which was mostly pop tunes with a bit of island swing. I loved their cover of “Ain’t No Sunshine When She’s Gone,” and they did a few more fun numbers And we were seated on the quiet back patio and had a few more Kona Brewing Company beers that couldn’t be beat. The kitchen was a little more efficient than it had been on Friday. I had the brisket quesadilla and it wasn’t half bad.
Then back to the room and soon to bed, it would be another huge day tomorrow.
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