Dead & Company Conquer Foxborough

A long time ago I decided I'd had enough of big rock and roll crowd scenes and there was really no attraction to seeing a band in a hockey rink or a football stadium.  I could have listed many reasons for that, and I was fine with it for years.

One huge reason was thinking that you could really not have a "concert" in such a setting, because it would be too difficult to get the sound anywhere near as good as in a theater or a club.  I remember making an exception to this rule for Dawes opening for Bob Dylan in Lowell in 2013.  Though they got the sound pretty good by the end of Dylan's set, it had been like wet cardboard for Dawes, and my prejudice was upheld.

But then I made another exception for the Fare Thee Well concerts in Levi's Stadium in Santa Clara in 2015 ... this was one concert event that attracted me as an event itself.  And the sound for it was really much better than I'd imagined it would be.  We were about at the opposite 40 yard line from the stage and 20-30 rows up from the field, and I enjoyed the concert immensely, stunned at the quality sound from all the instruments on stage.

Since then we'd seen Dead & Company in a variety of hockey rinks and the sound was excellent each time, and it was very good when seeing them in Fenway.  But even so, I hesitated when they announced that they'd be playing Gillette Stadium on June 22nd in their 2019 Summer tour (which started in Spring, though it was (barely) Summer by the time they got to Massachusetts).  I said, "Well, maybe we shouldn't go this year."  Dave did not hesitate, "Oh, we're going," he said.

Well yeah, he had a good point.  They've been so great for their almost 4 years as a band that it would be foolish to miss them this Summer.  It's not like they'd been going downhill, quite the opposite!  We even thought that we should go for the whole experience, and we got field tickets.  We weren't going to crowd up to the stage, but we wanted to get reasonably close.

The tour opened on the West Coast this year ... in the past they've gone East to West ... and the stop in Foxborough was their 12th of the tour.  We'd heard and seen a good number of the preceding shows as they slowly made their way East, and they'd been stunningly good.  Though they hadn't played as a band since their three shows in Mexico in January, and before that the 2018 Summer tour, they only showed a little rust in their first show, and after that showed absolutely no sign of the plodding, formulaic shows they've been accused of in the past.

In fact, they'd been uniformly inventive and maybe even a little daring.  They'd mixed in riffs from Miles and Coltrane here and there, pulled out Iko Iko to commemorate Dr. John's death, and opened shows and second sets with very non-formulaic stuff, like a standalone FOTM in Indiana, The Other One and Terrapin Station as show openers in Chicago, and an incredible Spanish Jam theme through their whole last set in Wrigley Field.  And though they'd not strayed from the second set Drums > Space routine, the drummers had an absence of gimmicks (ok, we saw Mickey knocking some shoes together at one point).  In short, they had set the bar very high by the time they got to New England, and we were psyched.

That Saturday had been forecast as sunny, hot, and windy all week, but we were a bit dismayed that possible showers and thunderstorms had entered into the fray by the time we left.  We did get a few showers on the way down there, picking up Dave in Quincy on the way and leaving our new kittens to woman the fort.  When we got to Gillette they had closed the huge Northbound-side lot and so we had to settle for the huge South-bound side lot after some twisting around.

We just had time to get out our chairs and crack a beer and then who should show up but Scott and Michelle?  We'd been hoping to get together with them and voila, there they were pulling in 20 or so cars after us, what great serendipity!  They had their chairs out and beers cracked (or whatever) right away and we had a great time hanging in the lot, and talking non-stop.  There were still huge white thunderclouds circling around us and we had seen some lightning and heard some thunder to the South.  And there was a HUGE turkey vulture flying low overhead.  But the thunderclouds passed, the vulture took off for some other site, and before we knew it it was time to go in.  We had to be there when the gates opened for the field!

We had had to switch our tickets to Will Call for reasons I won't go into, but picking them up was painless and then we had a chance to catch the end of soundcheck while waiting with a hundred or so others for the field to open.  When it did, most of the people rushed to the front but we had other plans.  We wanted something to lean against (and to protect us from crowd back and forth), and we were delighted to find that in front of the soundboard was close enough for our standards, and that this meant not only was there a fence right behind us, there was one to our right and so we had a mellow little backwater, close to the stage and with excellent sound.  We got beers and sat down.  Sarah got a great long sleeve t-shirt at the merch tent too (for $60!).

Gillette was nowhere near sold out as one might expect, but visually pretty full by the time the concert started.  They had originally tried to sell some of the top bowl, but ended up closing that off and mostly filling the middle bowl, as well as the bottom one.  The crowd was kind of late arriving, but the guys came on just a bit past 7 and warmed up.  OMG, it was Dead & Company again, we'd been seeing them get closer and closer across the country and they were finally back in town, ready to rock our heads off.

Wasn't soon before they hit us with another inventive opener, and this was the start to a few hours of what seemed at the time to be close to perfection ... and seems like it on reflection too.  Here's the first set:

Eyes Of the World
Deal
Black-Throated Wind
Easy Wind
Loser
Big Railroad Blues
Bird Song
Box Of Rain

Again, Dave's blog contains a lot of great detail about the songs and the ways in which they were played.  But besides that these elicited several strong impressions:

• I realized in a moment that they were opening with Eyes, and that this was a continuation of their adventurous openers.  But I feel this is one of the greatest songs ever written and was afraid it would take a feat of concentration to enjoy it to its utmost from a standing start.  No such delay though, I was immediately thrown into a state of bliss, like jumping into the deep end and finding it warm and fuzzy rather than cold and shocking.
• Oteil was playing his new bass, which had not impressed me earlier in the tour, but sure was fantastic live.  And John was playing as well as ever, effortlessly turning out astounding lead after astounding lead.  And that's not to mention the others.  This was as good or better playing and singing from everyone on stage than I'd ever seen from them before.  For them to all be at their peak at the same time was one of the reasons this show was so excellent.
• And the sound was incredible in front of the board!  We had some great neighbors and everyone was dancing and only a few people tried to barge past and then realize they had nowhere to go.  This was like being in a little living room in the middle of Gillette Stadium.  There were no flags.
• John started off with Big Boss Man when everyone else on stage knew that the setlist said Easy Wind, but he recovered and sang it with panache.  Loser is such a great song and to follow it with Big RR Blues really spoke deep down to the country fan in me.
• I thought the set might end after Bird Song, but then suddenly they were playing that intro and I was knocked flat.  I hadn't realized they had revived Box Of Rain and this was the third time I'd heard it in a few months, Port Chester in March, Bangor a week ago, and then here.  Once again, who are the Grateful Dead and why are they following my life so closely?  Yes, John blew the words and they had to do a "take 2," but that made it even easier to digest.

Ack!  Time for set break and they switched on the glaring football lights, then realized they didn't need to do that and mellowed them out just enough.  It was already almost dark and we needed just a bit of light.  I took off for the bathrooms (way up on the concourse) and the long wait for good beer.  There was only one stand nearby with the good stuff and they ran out halfway through filling my cup with ale! I told her not to dump it, to top it off with some pretty good witbier that was still on, and the result was palatable.

Almost time for the second set by the time I struggled back and again, they came on without much delay ... just about a 40-minute break.  The tuning was purposeful and Dave called it, a powerful beginning to another amazing set:

Help On the Way
Slipknot!
Franklin's Tower
He's Gone
Dark Star
Drums
Space
Stella Blue
Not Fade Away
Goin' Down the Road Feeling Bad
Not Fade Away

As wonderful as many DeadCo concerts we've been to have been, this very likely would have to be at the top of the list.  So many things about it were great:

• I can't emphasize enough how fantastic the sound was.  I had to turn around several times to verify that yes, I was in the middle of a huge football stadium, but the harmonics and echoes were tuned just right, like in a concert hall, and the power blasting from the stage was just perfect.
• Slipknot! was remarkable for its inventiveness, length, and democracy.  Everyone on stage had something to say about it.  And He's Gone was sung as beautifully as I've ever heard it, and with an incredibly infectious pace.
• During the jam after He's Gone I turned to Dave and commented that Dreamflower was out of luck.  Dave's friend had never heard a live Dark Star and was there that evening.  They hadn't played it since the 7th in Washington and we anticipated they would that night, but by that point in the set I figured it was too late for them to start it.  And then ... Jeff tinkled the first inkling of it and they all fell into place.  Again, see Dave's blog for more details, but this was one of the best Dark Stars I've ever heard ... and this song is at its best when filling a large space.
• And I have to comment on this Drums > Space segment, which was just fantastic.  Oteil joined Mickey and Billy in a furious attack on the tom-toms, and later Mickey did some amazing things on the beam.  When the band joined them for Space it was a soundscape you could float on.
• I'd predicted either Stella Blue or Morning Dew for the after-Space song, and when they started up Stella Blue it was more perfection.  Bobby's voice was at its strongest and most emotive.
• Crowd pleaser at the end, and this was the full thing, though the transition to GDTRFB could have been a bit more gradual.  Oh well, NFA had the whole stadium on its feet.

We were just gaping with open jaws and stunned expressions at each other and at our neighbors.  In our little living room in front of the soundboard this had been one of the best concerts I'd ever experienced, maybe the best.  Who cares how far away we were from anywhere else, we were where we should have been at that moment.

Very short break before they came back out and lined up for the encore.  They did The Weight and the only regret of the night was that Oteil and Jeff only had their verses on this to shine at lead vocals.  Bobby got the crowd going again with the vocal coda, and this was a great ending to a great night of music.  They waved and namasted and were gone.  We'll see more of the tour from the couch, but we'd just had a great one.

Headed up to the concourse for the bathrooms, and then down the long pedestrian ramp to get out, then up the huge stairway to traverse the shopping area.  But it actually wasn't very far back across route 1 to our car.  And just before we got there, we ran into Dreamflower and friend, and had some company.  The line out of the parking lot wasn't going anywhere, so we pulled out the chairs and had another beer and sandwich.  It had gotten kind of chilly by then.  It had been windy all day and the temperature had now dropped to sweatshirt level, not bad for a late June night.

Finally got on the road and, as expected, they made us go South out of the parking lot!  JFC, this was a pain but we got turned around safely after a while, made it back up past the Stadium, and then finally onto 95, 128, and back home where the kitties were waiting anxiously.  Got to bed around 2:00 or so, not bad for a Saturday night.  Hey, they didn't play that!

Phillie Tour In Bangor

Boy, all this stuff about vacation, travels, and reality had kept us from our true what-we-really-should-be-doing stuff, which is going to concerts.  Specifically, summer concert season.  And the big kick-off to summer concert season this year (even though it’s still very much late Spring in New England, especially up North) was that Willie Nelson’s annual extravaganza was starting their tour in Bangor Maine on June 14th!

If you don’t know who Willie Nelson is and what he means to the culture of this, our planet … I have no idea where to start (well, “The red-headed stranger from Blue Rock Montana rode into town one day…).  And what really blew us away when we first heard about this tour, was that he’d be playing with Phil Lesh & Friends, Alison Krauss, his sons’ bands, and a host of others (Outlaw Music Festival 2019).

They weren’t coming close to Boston, but that’s all relative.  They were opening at Darling’s Waterfront Pavilion in Bangor in mid-June (that's my sister's car dealer!).  And though that’s 3.5 hours away, when you get there it’s just a hop, skip, and jump from our house in Maine.  We signed up as soon as we could and got 7th row seats, though they were disappointingly far left.  This meant we were near the beer, bathrooms, and exit.  But I’m getting ahead of myself again.

Anyway, the three of us took that Friday off work and were going to drive up that morning, but at the last minute we decided to go up Thursday after work.  This meant we drove through a Biblical rain-storm, but we stopped at the BBQ place in Augusta for dinner and had a pretty successful trip up … we’ve done this before.

One thing led quickly to another on Friday morning and before we knew it it was time to leave, armed with sunscreen, bug spray, rain slickers, sweatshirts, sunglasses, food, and all kinds of summer concert stuff.  This was Maine after all, and though the mid-June day seemed temperate, the forecast called for scattered showers and lows perhaps dipping into the 40s that night.

Pleasant drive up to Bucksport and up the Penobscot River on 15, and then over to the big city on the 1A bridge and soon we were at the Pickering Square Parking Garage, where we had a late lunch of a few sandwiches while watching the other concert-goers assemble.  Then a nice (but windy!) walk down Main Street to the venue.

This was a real mixed crowd.  There were a number of older people with flannel shirts and cowboy boots (or the Maine equivalent) there to see Willie, a number of people with flannel shirts over tie-dyed t-shirts there for Phil, a number of people with flannel shirts and a polite demeanor there for Allison, and a number of people with flannel shirts and work boots there for the rock bands.  OK, there was a common thread here.  It was a beautiful day on the waterfront in Bangor, and we all milled around.

We three detoured to the park at water’s edge and emptied our water bottles in preparation for going in.  We had our stuff in clear plastic bags as prescribed, and were prepared for one of *those* concert entry experiences.  One woman in front of us did her best to slow down the line, but it was really pretty painless.  It was a long slog past the food vendors and the port-a-potties to get in, but when we got to our 7th row seats things were pretty good.  The beer tent was 50 feet away, the bathrooms 100 feet, and the stage less than that.

Brief paragraph on Darlings’s Waterside Pavilion, based on our subjective observations that day, including a tour around the environs.  Though there were several good things about it, there was a lot that was sub-prime about this place.  If you had a seat in the front few sections the sight lines were very good, but the back and lawn seats were pitiful, you might as well stay home and watch it on TV since that’s what you were going to do anyway.  I think from most of the lawn seats you physically would not be able to see the stage.  The beer was expensive and they ran out of everything except Bud Light halfway through the concert.  The bathrooms were just a row of port-a-potties and sometimes had long lines.  And they wouldn’t let you bring in any food and then when you were inside you had to wait in line forever to get gruesome, fried fare.  Dave waited in line at what should have been a less-busy time but was in line for 40 minutes.

And when we got to our seats we were delighted in some ways, but overwhelmed in others.  The first act, Particle Kid (Willie’s son Micah), had started right on time at 3:30 when we were just entering the venue.  And at our seats the volume was deafening.  I don’t often complain about things being too loud, but this was intense!  Particle Kid is a really fun power-rock (with a little bit of indie or emo) trio with Micah shredding it on guitar, and a driving bass and drums.  And they had it turned up to 11.  We could not hear each other, shouting as we were from one seat to another.

But they were really pretty good and Micah Nelson was being a showman in unlaced work boots, windmilling on his guitar when the mood went from moody to excited, and jumping on the speakers at the front of the stage when he thought people weren’t paying attention.  He had a spaceman wandering around stage and had a filter that made his guitar sound like a laser gun.  A lot of people did pay attention to him and and we gave him and his act a good reception.

As we asked ourselves (and the friends we met at our seats) about most of the acts that day, how you could not like something like that?  They were good musicians laying it down for us and though their genre or song-writing choices might not be to your taste (Particle Kid has a song (and a video) called “Everything Is Bullshit” and the chorus went, “Everything is fucking bullshit,” which was quite the twist!), this was authentic American music with no trace of irony, though it had a lot of angst.

Next up was another of Willie’s sons, Lukas, with his band Promise Of the Real, which has been around since 2008 and is currently Neil Young’s regular backing band.  They delivered a very polished set of country rock at a slightly lower volume, though Lukas had his brother Micah on lead guitar and he tried to rip it up.  Some of their songs are really well-written and this was quite an enjoyable set, as the afternoon threatened to end sometime.  We were shaded by the tent around the stage, but the sun was starting to get pretty brilliant as it got lower in the sky.

It was another one of those experiences when you think that the day will last forever, and suddenly the first two sets were gone.  Next up was The Revivalists, a New Orleans-based rock band (on the poppier side) who have a pretty good sound themselves.  They’re not really the kind of band that grabs me, being not very funky, not very guitar-driven, and not very anything distinctive.  This was just good solid original rock music with feeling and a baritone sax.  And the lead singer looked like a rock guy, he was wiry with a lot of hair.

OK, halfway through and the great part was about to start.  Dave had waited in the interminable food line and got me a decent hot dog when he got there.  The guys were setting up the stage for Alison and this was quite a production.  They lowered a backdrop of some attic windows, brought in a gas lamp and a dollhouse(??), and scattered several Ionic pedestals around.  I think they were going for a “Windy City” kind of visual atmosphere but it mostly fell flat.

This was especially true for us because we couldn’t really see it.  Though we were in the 7th row we were pretty far left.  Not far enough so we couldn’t see and enjoy the musicians (there was even another section to our left), but we were at a severe angle to the stage and there was a cameraman in our way, so though we could see the musicians, we couldn’t really see their setup or the cute bits on the stage.

The cameras (one on each side, pretty close to the action) were there to feed the real-time TV screens flanking the stage, which were probably all the people on the lawn could see, as mentioned.  You could understand why they were there, though the camera on our side was kind of a pain for us, it was right in the way.  As close to the stage as we were, many of the people around us watched the TV screens most of the time anyway.  Not me.  I glanced at them from time to time to (e.g.) see Willie professionally lit or to see Bobbie Nelson on piano (not at all visible from the audience), but most of the time I was riveted on the stage.

So anyway, Alison came on and what a band she had.  We’d been wondering about Phil’s band and there had not been good information about this (see below), but even more lacking was information as to what kind of band Alison would have.  She brought the A-team.  How’s this: Jeff White(!) on mandolin and vocals, Sidney Cox on dobro and vocals (they were both in a “trio” mike arrangement with her at mid-stage), Matt Rollings on piano, Barry Bales on bass, Ron Block on guitar and banjo, and a lead guitarist and drummer whose names we didn’t catch.

Alison was great, though a jarring juxtaposition to the loud and frantic rock that came before her.  As I say, many of the people there were there to see her, and she sure brought the goods, backed up by that incredible band.  They opened with a couple of songs from her latest record to set the pace, and then hit most of her big ones:

• River In the Rain
• I Never Cared For You
• Stay
• Forget About It
• Baby Now That I’ve Found You
• Ghost In This House
• Let Your Loss Be Your Lesson
• The Lucky One
• Sister Rosetta Goes Before Us
• It’s Goodbye and So Long To You
• Angel Flying Too Close To the Ground
• Go To Sleep You Little Baby
• Let Me Touch You For Awhile
• Sawing On the Strings
• Down To the River To Pray
• Gentle On My Mind
• When You Say Nothing At All
• When I’ve Done the Best I Can I Want My Crown

Yikes, this was 18 songs and she did them in at most 90 minutes.  These were all pretty short renditions, and the stage crew was doing the thing of thrusting the instruments for the next song into the musicians’ hands before they’d really finished the one they were working on.  But this pace was great for us and great for the delighted crowd.  Though she did nothing approaching a rocker and so may have put some people to sleep, this was music of the highest quality and had me on the edge of my seat.  Some highlights were the trio vocals and Alison’s fiddle of course, Block’s guitar work, and just amazing runs from Rollings on piano.

OK, time to get ready for what we were really there for.  As mentioned, it was a little mysterious who was going to be on stage with Phil.  He had played with Jorma Kaukonen, John Molo, Rob Barraco, and Grahame Lesh earlier in the week in Port Chester, and that band was going to be with him the next day at Mountain Jam.  Between those two gigs there was this stop on the Willie tour, and we hoped that that same band would be playing.  But we had heard late that Ross James and Alex Koford from his other band were going to be there, so we weren’t sure (I saw Ross and Alex at the beer tent during the first act).

Though we were disappointed that Jorma wasn’t there, Phil ended up playing with the rest of that great band of Molo, Barraco, and Grahame, and also added James, Koford, AND Elliott Peck.  Just say “Elliott Peck” to me and I will be happy.  So let’s say you’re playing “rock stars trading cards” and you get offered the chance to trade your Jorma Kaukonen card for three others: Ross James, Alex Koford, and Elliott Peck.  Would you do it?

Whatever, this band hit the floor running and turned in a neat 90-minute set that had us in ecstasy.  Molo reinforced his nickname of “White Cloud” right before they started, and I tried to emulate him.  Here’s the list:

• New Minglewood Blues (RJ)
• Jack Straw (RJ, GL)
• Box Of Rain (PL)
• Ramble On Rose (AK)
• The Music Never Stopped (RJ)
• The Wheel (all)
• Help On the Way (RB)
• Slipknot!
• I Know You Rider (all)
• Brokedown Palace (EP)

This was just excellent, excellent stuff, a whole evening of Phil Lesh music compressed into a short set.  Ross started it off with a breathtakingly funky take on Minglewood, including growling over the Maine phillies.  The intro to Jack Straw was pure Furthur.  I hope Phil is singing Box Of Rain when I die, or if and when he dies.  Ramble On Rose did not really take off but had Elliott on vocal and her style is enough to knock the wind out of you.  Then what I thought it was an exceptional Music … until Elliott stepped up and sang those parts and it went from great to epic…

There was a woman dancing in front of us, in ecstasy at hearing and being so close to Phil.  Elliott stepped up to the mike and the woman grabbed herself and shouted, “She’s singing the Donna parts!!!”  Yes she was, and she got them down.

The Wheel was done with all the trimmings, and then it seemed like the second set had started when we calmed down from that and Rob got us right back up with an excellent vocal on Help and the band went full tilt into a shortened Slipknot!  Then we all realized it was time to end the shortened Dead show when they wound it down with Rider.  But what would be the “encore?”  Elliott’s turn to shine again and she knocked out a fantastic Brokedown that left not a dry eye in the house.

But what was I doing during all of this?  Watching Phil of course.  Rob was really on that night and Grahame unexpectedly chimed in with some fantastic leads.  Koford is a surprisingly tasteful rhythm guitar player and the interplay between the three guitarists was great (Ross switched to pedal steel for The Wheel and made it sound like first Garcia).  And Molo was great, though I couldn’t really see him.  But as ever, the player of the night was … Phil!  I could just listen to his bass pounding and soaring and coloring my world for a long time.  We were pretty close to the stage, and there were a lot of people and things between me and him, and we were outside in the middle of a huge crowd.  But I was watching him and he was right there, somehow becoming more vivid to me as I watched.  I was looking through a perceptual tunnel and realized what a wonderful time he was having, doing what he likes to do best.  He was ageless and so was I.

I had thought we might get an abbreviated donor rap, but they had a schedule to meet.  They all bowed at center stage like a proper P&F band, and then Phil’s only remarks were to get ready for Willie!  So we did.

Oh boy, were we really nearing the end of the night?  They took forever setting up the stage for Willie, and teased us with a couple of his music videos on the big screen, which didn’t seem to hurry him up at all.  Finally he came on at about 10:20 and treated us to an hour set.

With Willie was his sister Bobbie on tinkling piano of course, a bass player, son Micah on traps, a percussionist, Mickey Raphael on harmonica, and son Lukas on electric guitar.  I have to say that their set was not great, though seeing Willie is an electric thrill.  His tempos were as oddball as ever but this is his style, and when he would take over a song on his beat-up old guitar, which he did not hesitate to do, he was enthralling.

The played very much a “greatest hits” set for the Maine country crowd, opening with Whiskey River and cruising through such stuff as Mamas Don’t Let Your Babies Grow Up To Be Cowboys, On the Road Again, Angel Flying Too Close to the Ground (though Alison had covered it earlier that evening), Always On My Mind, Roll Me Up and Smoke Me, It’s All Gone To Pot, etc.  Dave was amazed when he’d be singing a verse, suddenly point his mike to the crowd, and we’d finish it for him.  This was a crowd of Willie freaks, though a lot of people left in the middle of it to try to beat the traffic.

Willie at one point whipped off his hat and threw it into the crowd, and later got a bunch of bandannas that he tossed hither and yon.  This wasn’t a really inspired performance, but what do you expect of an 86-year old musician on the first night of a tour?  Also, it was getting kind of cold by that point.  There had been a few sprinkles of rain, one almost approaching a steady drizzle, and the temperature had dropped.  This was Maine though, and we were all prepared … everyone got out their rain slicker and/or sweatshirt.

And then sooner than expected, it was over!  I’d been thinking we’d go until midnight but apparently there’s an 11:30 curfew for music acts in Bangor and they stopped even before that … must have been 11:20.  I was afraid it would take us forever to get out of the amphitheater but it actually went pretty well, and though it was a long walk back to the car that went well also.

Of course, once we were in the parking garage we realized it would take a while to get out of there.  As anticipated, we were starving and this was a great time to chill out and have a sandwich.  Sooner or later the backup started moving and we joined the end of it.  The drive back to Sedgwick was not too painful and then we were back in our house in the woods, having seen a great concert nearby.  Bed at just about exactly 1AM.

Pre- Post-Narrative, 5/18/19

Note on orthography: In the above posts I perhaps use Hawaiʻian spellings more (or less) often than I should.  And perhaps I’m inaccurate by calling these spellings orthographical, which implies a written language.  Hawaiʻian was first written by missionaries trying to understand the culture, and for that reason I find their orthography helpful, and include the glottal stop (ʻokina), indicated by a backwards apostrophe, and the macron (kahakō) to indicate accented vowels.

But is this proper in all circumstances?  For instance, I spell the Big Island’s name as “Hawaiʻi” but I feel the State name is properly spelled “Hawaii,” and I generally use the English orthography for the adjective “Hawaiian.”  In some cases (e.g. “Pu'uhonua O Hōnaunau National Historical Park”) the orthography is part of an official name, so is essential to use, but in some instances it may not be and I use it anyway.

You may criticize me for being inconsistent and/or pedantic, but as is true with all my blog posts, this is written for me.  I want to remember how these local place names should be pronounced.


I’m writing this post in real-time, on our first day back, as opposed to the “daily” posts dated in the previous week.  My normal procedure is to write separate posts for each day after I get back from a vacation and date them as if they’d been written on the morning after that day so they will sort correctly, and for narrative sanity.

That usually works well.  But in the case of writing about our May 2019 trip to Hawaiʻi, I feel compelled to write about my overall impressions before diving into the daily narrative (or after, depending on how you read this blog).  And I also want to be sure to touch on the overriding themes, like gray Jeeps, mynas, spooky goats, and tall mountains, and thought this might be the best way to do it.

It’s perhaps over dramatic to call this a “trip of a lifetime.”  But that description applies in some ways.  Ever since I remember learning that somewhere out there was a place thousands of miles away from anywhere else, in the middle of the hugest ocean on Earth, I told myself that I’d go there some day.  That’s a life-long aspiration right there, and I think it’s a common one for most of us: to go somewhere exotic where our cares, the constraints we all live by, and even the hardness of life might not apply (don’t they just eat fruit off the trees on those islands?).

Since that childhood aspiration, life went along at the pace we’re all used to, and Sarah and I went to the American Southwest, to London, to Paris, to Yosemite, to Yellowstone, to Mexico, to the Everglades … and most recently to Virginia!  But we decided in early 2018 that it was time to do it and go to Hawaiʻi, and we started making plans.  Speaking of life, that was around the time that we learned that my father had been diagnosed with cancer and given a limited time to live.  Did this factor in our decision that it was time to actually make that trip we’d always been dreaming of?  Maybe and maybe not.  But note that our two most significant trips (this and Southwest 1989) were right after the loss of a parent.

Of course we planned this logically.  What we most wanted to see there was Hawaiʻi Volcanoes National Park.  We knew that a trip to Hawaiʻi would not please us if we did not go to the volcanoes, and so going to the Big Island had to be on the itinerary.  And we soon realized that that alone would be our kind of trip.  We could go directly to the Big Island and have enough to do there to fill the whole vacation; we could leave Oʻahu, Maui, etc. for some possible other time.  If we did just those islands we would be left hanging, but if went to Hawaiʻi itself then we could approach the level of having been there and done that.

So in mid-2018 we’d settled on a destination and we soon got a guidebook (“Hawaii, the Big Island Revealed,” by Andrew Doughty, we loved it), and settled on a date: mid-Spring 2019.  This would be after the crowded Winter season, before the kids got out of school and families appeared everywhere, and would be good for our vacation schedules, including Dave’s.  When we asked him if he wanted to come with us he said, “Do not even think about going to Hawaiʻi without me!!!”

This narrowed things down a lot, but there were still some big questions such as Kailua-Kona or Hilo, hotel or bed-and-breakfast, one place or a planned circuit … and then other bits fell into place.  I was on the phone with a Hampton Inn about a summer thing we were going to and they said, “Stay on the phone for a special offer!”  So I did.  They (Hilton Grand Vacations) asked me if I’d ever dreamed about a get-away vacation to (one of a set of) exotic places, and one of the places they named was Kailua-Kona.  So I stayed on the phone even longer and they realized they had a sucker on the line and made me an offer, and I went for it.

The fact is that I’d been doing some research and realized that the package hotel room price they were offering me was better than we could do piecing together reservations ourselves.  And the free(!) rental car they were offering with it would allow us to get around to all the places we wanted to see (the Big Island is the size of Connecticut and Rhode Island put together).  Resort fees and further Hilton points (Hampton Inn was part of the Hilton family at that time, see below if you want more boring details) were also part of the package, but that was beside the point for me.  So I gave them my credit card information.

We did not book specific dates at that time.  There was some later talk about delaying the trip, but my Dad insisted that we take our vacation as we had planned.  We finally decided to go for it and set the dates with the hotel (Hilton Waikoloa Village in Hawaiʻi’s South Kohala District, May 10 to May 17), and then got plane tickets (arriving back May 18 early).  In another dollop of serendipity, Hawaiian Airlines started non-stop flights from Boston to Honolulu in April 2019 and so we were some of their first customers, at a non-outrageous price.

The time got closer and closer, and unfortunately my Dad got worse and worse.  My final talk with him was on the Sunday before we left, in which we acknowledged our love for each other and said goodbye.  And then he passed away early Thursday morning, the day before we were to leave.  He’d traveled all over the world and we had to keep up with him.

Now you should go back and read the daily blogs, starting with our departure on Friday, May 10.  But wait!  What I wanted to talk about first was not so much a narrative preamble, as I’ve been doing above, but a catalog of my strongest impressions.  I’ve gotten some pretty strong impressions from our vacations in beautiful natural areas, but this perhaps topped them all.  Let me try to organize my thoughts into categories…

Climate/Mountains/Altitude
Hawaiʻi is the Southernmost, youngest, and largest, of the Hawaiʻian Islands.  These islands were formed as the Hawaiʻi-Emperor seamount chain has passed to the Northwest over a hotspot in the Earth’s mantle; and on the youngest island, some of the volcanoes formed by the hotspot are still active.  The five above-ground volcanoes on the Big Island dominate the landscape, and though the youngest and the centerpiece of Hawaiʻi Volcanoes National Park, Kīlauea, erupted in late Spring 2018, none were erupting while we were there.

But wow, did those mountains dominate in so many ways!  When we flew in I was sure that was the largest, Mauna Loa, that was filling up seemingly half of the sky, looming over us.  But this was only Hualālai.  Geez, how do I describe this place?

Down on the coast, especially the Kona coast, temperatures were in the 80s and 70s day and night, and the wind, while sometimes stiff, was never threatening.  But unless you hugged the coast you were always going up or down (or both) and wind could suddenly take over, or clouds could close you in, or rain could suddenly fall in a mist, or persistently, or insistently and as hard as a New England Northeaster.  Weather there at the same time was amazingly consistent and could change remarkably, based on the whims of the mountains and the wind.

And the mountains each had their characters.  These characters were set in stone, but you realized that this was all young stone.  The huge Mauna Loa (supposedly the largest mountain in the world in mass) ripped a gash in the firmament, and split the Northeast trades, rendering them into swirling mists and a stream of clouds that covered its Western neighbor, Hualālai (8271 feet).  We could usually see the top of Mauna Loa when the sightlines were right, but the swirling mass of clouds it formed coalesced around Hualālai, forming a thick cover, and we only saw the top of that mountain a couple of times.

Up to the North was Kohala (5479 feet), the oldest of the mountains on the Big Island but by no means the least significant.  This was perhaps the district of the island we loved the most, and Kohala provided the spookiest fogs and swirlingest mists, and the greenest pastures and hollows.

The most majestic is Mauna Kea, the White Mountain.  Both Mauna Kea and Mauna Loa are close to 14,000 feet, and the Saddle Road between them, which we drove over several times, goes up to 6632 feet.  This is almost twice the height of Mt. Greylock, the highest point in Massachusetts; and note that these mountains are all surrounded by the Pacific Ocean, as opposed to mountain ranges that start at an already high elevation.  The two have very different profiles however, Mauna Kea almost seeming craggy at points, and Mauna Loa gradually rising and rising and rising into the stratosphere.

And on a Southern flank of Mauna Loa is the one you really want to watch out for, Kīlauea, one of the most active volcanoes in the world.  Hard to see this as a mountain unto itself, but you know it is, especially when you see the caldera.

And when we were driving up the Kohala coast or down the Saddle Road, and the weather was right, you could see a sixth volcano, Haleakalā on Maui, around 80 miles to the North over the ocean.  Haleakalā usually wore a skirt of clouds and towered up above them, making an otherworldly sight when you gazed North through the blue over the water.  And I swear once I even saw Mauna Kahalawai, the East Maui mountain chain.

And speaking of otherworldly, at times you could see right up to the top of Mauna Kea when the cloud cover and sightlines allowed it, and up there is a cluster of the billion-dollar telescopes that photograph the cosmos.  On one day the clouds were a little low and gray and threatening, probably holding a lot of rain.  And then the golden sun shone through thousands of feet above and lit up the silver telescopes at the very top of the mountain, up above the clouds.  It was a glowing vision of a city of jewels floating above the gray clouds of the Earthly dominion.  No description or picture could document that sight in full, or tell you how uplifting this was, seeing it through the windshield of our rental Hyundai Elantra while we cruised along the lower slopes of the mountain.

And on our second to last day we were driving down the Belt Road from Waimea and suddenly realized we could see them all.  Ok, maybe we couldn’t see them all, but here’s what we could see: Kohala lurking behind us, Mauna Kea towering to our left, Mauna Loa drifting up into the sky in front of us, Hualālai shrouded by clouds just to its right, and Haleakalā across the sea to our right.  And the late-afternoon light on them all was beautiful.  This was one of the most magical moments of the trip.

Fauna and Flora
We saw lots of animals, flowers, and trees on the trip.  Many of them, especially the flowers and trees, were unknown to us and so didn’t stick in our minds the way they should.  But here are some of the ones that did.

• Mynas – It’s astounding how ubiquitous these birds are, all over the Island.  They’re an invasive species in the starling family but are really handsome and show a lot of character.  Hundreds (thousands?) of them, possibly from far away, would gather and roost on the roof and inside of the Ocean Tower every night.  We could see them from our balcony, coming from up the coast and from inland in twos and threes to join the mob of birds that must be up/in there already.  And they had sentinels; one or two older birds would be on the rail of the roof, chirping them all home, maybe ticking them off on a clipboard.

• The Nēnē is endemic to Hawaiʻi, a 500,000 year-old offshoot of the goose family that is threatened, and we were eager to see them.  Unfortunately, Sarah and I only saw one (Dave saw others from the car), and it was while we were walking around our resort on our first full day there!  We of course thought that we’d see others but that was the only one.
• We also saw many, many English Sparrows, a good number of Saffron Finches around our hotel, and dove-like birds that seemed to be all over the island.  We also saw one owl out in the pastures up the mountain and some weird ducks on the seacoast.  We didn’t see any Hawaiʻian hawks, though I’m sure some saw us.

• Fish – Jeez, did we see (and eat) a lot of fish!  There was a weird assortment in the canal at the hotel, including barracudas, carp, and quite a variety.  And we saw a panoply of tropical fish in the lagoon and especially when we snorkeled.  If I do some research I might be able to name a few of the species.
• Other marine life - We also saw several green sea turtles in the lagoon at the Resort, and though we tried to avoid them (they’re endangered), some of them were very curious and appeared out of the mist right above or below us.  We also saw tiny periwinkles and muscles growing on the lava in the sea.  And when we went snorkeling the fish were outlined against many, many different kinds of corals and sea urchins.  We also saw some seaweed; the most common sort was remarkably like the kind of rock weed we see in New England, though not as shaggy.
• Goats – We may have seen more feral goats than any other mammal.  On one trail, they had us surrounded and kind of spooked!  On the roads, they were on the verge everywhere, down on the coast and up on the mountain.

• There were plenty of other mammals too: cows, horses, sheep, and domestic goats were on the farms.  We were surprised to see lots of mongooses, scavenging around the hotel.

• We were also surprised at the number of feral cats we saw, all around the coastal sections of the island.  We were not really looking forward to meeting a feral pig, but did see one dead on the side of the road.  OR maybe he was just sleeping.

• We were delighted to see the ʻōhiʻa lehua tree all over, though not at higher elevations.  This is one of those trees that has a legend.  I like trees, especially legendary ones.

• But my favorite tree was the monkeypod tree (also spelled “monkey pod”), which can grow to incredible heights and breadths, shading a whole ecosystem.  I could have stood next to some of the ones I saw for days, trying to communicate with them.  We also saw some great mango and banyan trees on the trip.

• Oooh, I can’t forget to mention the chickens.  They were so ubiquitous that they seemed to have their own culture.  In most places where you see chickens “running free,” you can tell which household they actually belong to.  Many of the ones we saw were totally wild though, they were red junglefowl, the genetic predecessor to domestic chickens.  They perched where they wanted and you gave them a wide berth.

• And I can’t forget the geckos.  They were everywhere (at sea level that is), in cracks of buildings, on leaves, nestling in rocks, etc., though they would have preferred that we didn’t see them.  And many of them were very colorful, though they were all small.

Resorts/Money/Restaurants
I’m sure that social scientists could write a library of books about, e.g., the Hilton Waikoloa Resort and its compatriots.  Resorts were all around us on the Kohala coast and were scattered throughout the rest of the Island, especially down in South Kona.  We’ve heard and seen evidence that most of the people who go to them don’t wander far, maybe to the beaches or golf courses near there.  The Resort tries to keep them there and milk them for money.

OMG, it’s all about the upsell and many people are complicit with this.  Do you want a room upgrade, a special spot on the beach, guaranteed reservations at the spa or the restaurant, or bizarre beach toys that cost a bundle and your kids are yelling for?  They gave you a “free” rental car but you had to park in their lot and they charged you $30/day for that, when there was no way the spot was worth this much … it was clearly just a way of manipulating you.  They charged $40 for breakfast when there were no other breakfast options beside driving to a nearby town.

They did push a few “activities,” but they were all things that cost a lot of money themselves and didn’t require you to go far; like playing golf on the endless courses they’ve plunked on top of the lava or cruise boats that pick you up at a local dock.

But the people who go there (we saw equal parts Asians and Americans) seem to be having a good time, so who am I to criticize?  The driving ranges were full of guys (and boys) every morning when we drove by, and the golf courses were all in use.  The lagoon at the hotel was kind of gross (I’m sure many kids piddled in it), but always did a good business and some of the people using it may have had an opportunity there to snorkel or paddleboard or swim with fish that they had never had before.

The restaurants at the Resort were expensive and not that good, though not that bad.  And the art was an endless series of knockoffs masquerading as the real thing.  And many things about the Resort were so inconvenient, like the distances you had to walk (or you could take the tram or boat if you had all day, as most people did).

Oh well.  The Hilton Waikoloa made my skin crawl in some ways but I can see how lots of people enjoy it if they can afford it and don’t feel guilty spending that much money.  We stayed in a Resort in Mexico and didn’t really mind it, perhaps because we were not entirely comfortable in the overseas environment and the Resort filled a need for us.  But I don’t understand why an American would go to a Resort in America.  I’m weird I guess.

Gray Jeeps, and Other Cars
When we were in California, the plurality of cars on the highway were white.  And in Hawaiʻi we saw an astounding number of gray Jeeps.  Why?  You don’t see many gray Jeeps in the wild.  Maybe it was because the guide books warned that not all roads were navigable by 2-wheel drives and the rental companies took advantage of this to stick lots of people with Jeeps, and gray was cheap.  But most that we saw were on the highway or parked, not on challenging roads!  We also saw a large number of white, convertible Mustangs in the parking lots, though we didn’t see many of these on the road.  I think all of the guys who rented them were busy out on the driving range.

We also saw a lot of trucks with “Matson” on their sides, which is apparently a local shipping company.  We saw their terminal in Kawaihae.

And the weirdest thing on the car front was all the abandoned cars we saw.  During the week we were driving around we passed about 2 dozen abandoned on the side of public roads, some looking like they hadn’t moved in decades and some recent (that’s not counting the ones we saw abandoned on private property).  That Mercedes recently abandoned near the top of the Waikoloa Road is probably not moving soon.  And the road outside Two Step had ditches deep enough to swallow a car and in fact *had* swallowed two, one of which was covered with weeds and may date from before the War.

Culture/Religion/Mauna Kea and Pele Battling Over the Land, etc.
I was delighted to get some insight into what it felt like spiritually to live on the Big Island, though I’m sure my perceptions are very subjective.  The pre-European society especially seemed very restrictive, but isn’t this true of all cultures?  An NPS demonstrator at Pu'uhonua O Hōnaunau told us a lot about the Hawaiʻian gods, which is detailed in that day’s blog.  But what he told us and what we realized was that the Hawaiʻians adapted their religion to the natural and cultural forces around them, while using it to explain and humanize forces they could not control.  For instance, they told of Mauna Kea and the goddess Pele constantly battling over the interior of Hawaiʻi, most of all the saddle between Mauna Kea and Mauna Loa, where Pele lived.  And no human lived there for fear of that.  For sure there was lava there, indicating the destruction caused by this battle over the years.  But people sent their cows up there so maybe it wasn’t all bad.

Geology, Time
OK, this bit was written after I’d thought about the experience for a bit, which may make it more valuable.

I’ve had a hard time putting into words what made the Hawaiʻi trip so fantastic, and a hard time realizing it.  Perhaps this will take a while for me to understand.  But I’m up in Maine now and looking closely at the land around here, which I feel a great affinity with.  And it’s clear that my affinity with the land in Hawaiʻi was very different.  It occurs to me that the land in Hawaiʻi was strikingly young and unsettled, and that made more of a difference than you might think.

What we saw and walked (and drove) on is some of the most recent land on Earth.  And the animals and people and flowers and trees and religions and language there are recent too.  Everything on Hawaiʻi is new and exotic … how long does it take before something is “native” when the land itself is new?

There were reminders of this all around us.  Every piece of rock there is still recognizably lava, not the product of epochs.  Yes, we saw river-worn and ocean-worn stones, but though some of these seemed brown or speckled, it didn’t take much inspection to realize this was stuff that had been thrown out of a volcano (or oozed out) sometime within the last few thousand years.  Though it might be weathered and rounded, this was stuff that had been shaped recently, not the granite and shale that we see in New England, the product of millions of years of pressure and metamorphosis.

We have estuaries on the mainland, and long valleys.  The difference in Hawaiʻi was that the land and the shore and the mountains and all the plants seemed to have just occurred.  They hadn’t had time to be there forever.  Where there are valleys they’re jagged, and where there are wetlands, they’re ephemeral.

We’d read that the most magical thing about Hawaiʻi is seeing land forming.  No lava was flowing while we were there, but we didn’t need to see it.  What was there had just been laid down, like fresh tarmac on the highway of life.

Me
So what did this trip tell me about myself?  I’d experienced a lot of anxiety before the trip and was fielding texts and emails about the real world all along, and I didn’t sleep that well, probably for multiple reasons.  Some mornings were a blur, but I tried to concentrate on the beauty of the island, of life, and of sharing this experience with my wife and son.  I think I did that pretty well, and I don’t know if I’ll have a second chance there.  But I think this trip filled a little space of my life and gave me something to take with me.  It was glorious and gave me memories I’ll never forget, like seeing the top of Mauna Kea through the clouds and feeling so far away from anywhere.  Of course, wherever you go, there you are.  But I think of myself as more complete for this experience, if only by a little bit.

Leaving Hawaiʻi

Friday May 17

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.”

Up Mauna Kea, and Down Again

Thursday May 16

Oh no, suddenly it was our last full day!  We were getting a little burned out on sleeping in a double bed (as opposed to the queen size we’re used to), not really having a kitchen, and being more and more alienated by the Resort.  But we were still having a fine time and were sad that we were reaching the end.  What should we do on our last day?

One thing I had put on the prioritized list we made of things to do in Hawaiʻi was to drive up Mauna Kea.  We went back and forth about that a few times since then.  None of us are great at altitude and the mountain is 14,000 feet, way higher than we’d ever been before.  Sarah and I had been up over 10K feet twice and Dave had once, and I remember feeling dizzy and short on breath even at that elevation.  But we loved the mountains on Hawaiʻi and were sorely tempted to give it a shot.  A beach day on our last day would have meant trying to deal with wet and sandy stuff in our luggage, and so was not appealing.

The Maunakea Visitor Information Center [sic] is on the mountainside at 9000 feet.  So we decided to go for that and see if we then felt inclined to go farther up.  And it seems strange, but we had seen such great stuff just driving around the island that we were psyched for another road trip up the Saddle Road to see what we could see (the other side of the mountain??).

Another factor was that we love eating big breakfasts on vacation.  And as we had found out, the only breakfast place anywhere in the area charged outrageous prices, and we had skimped on breakfast because of that.  But we decided to go for it one more time, even at the unbelievable price of $40/person.  Sarah claimed that she was going to eat three omelets.

Did a little bit of prep for the day, but then walked on down to Big Island Breakfast and got in line.  They do have a great omelet station, where you select what you want in your omelet from lots of choices, put it all on a plate, and present it to the cook, who had 5 hotplates going and was custom-cooking those omelets like a pro.  In fact, he was a pro and admitted to Sarah later that he practiced this at home.  The omelets were made with farm-grown eggs (aren’t all eggs … well, never mind).  And they also had piles of bacon and sausage, quite a variety of fresh fruit (we went for papaya and pineapple), lots of fresh pastries, juices, and all the other stuff you might eat for breakfast, including sugary cereals for the keiki.  And they brought us an acceptable pot of coffee.

Sarah could only fit two omelets, and Dave and I tried hard ourselves, but we were pretty stuffed.  And that was a good reason not to immediately go for a long hike.  We needed time to digest!  There were several big guys sitting at tables who seemed to be making the most of the breakfast.  They weren’t about to go on long hikes either and might be there all morning.

Back in the room we got everything together for one last Hawaiʻi expedition, made it down the Museum Walkway again (we would not miss this), filled our flotilla of bottles at the water station, and went down to the lot to get Hector fired up.  One more time, we rocketed up the Waikoloa Road (saying good morning to the Mercedes abandoned near the top), traversed over to Inouye Highway, and blasted up the mountainside.  And when we got to the fork for the Mauna Kea Road, we took it!

The road, which is soon over the crest coming from the West,  turned a lot narrower and a bit steeper very quickly.  And it increased steadily in pitch over the next few miles.  It also started switching back and forth until it was doing it pretty violently.  Again, it’s a good thing I’m not a nervous driver because there were several places where we were hanging out over space and could have easily crashed down the mountainside if we had strayed from the road.

The landscape was pretty much brown dirt (if not black lava) with a few scattered tufts of grass at the top of the Saddle Road (@6600 feet), and we stayed in that climate zone as we climbed up to the Maunakea Visitor Information Center (also known as the Onizuka Center for International Astronomy Visitor Information Station, named after Ellison Onizuka, a Hawaiʻian who died in the Challenger disaster in 1986).  The parking lot was under construction and so only a few spots were open, and they were all full!  I hovered in the lot for the next available space (which opened up soon) while Sarah and Dave went in, and then I joined them.  This isn’t really much of an “information center,” really it’s just a small gift shop (selling mostly sweatshirts and warm hats to tourists not prepared for a mountain climate) with a few displays about the telescopes and lots of displays on the dangers of driving up to the top without 4-wheel drive.

They do have a short trail through their Silver Sword preserve, an endemic, dramatic plant found on that mountain.  This was a great opportunity for us to stretch our legs, breathe deeply, and see how the altitude was affecting us.

We were a little disappointed that we had climbed up the mountain and really could not see much.  It was another beautiful day with fast-moving clouds, but the Visitor Information Center is in a fold on the mountainside surrounded by cinder cones, and so you could not see out to the ocean as we had hoped, or even to the other mountains.

We realized after a while that we would be ok.  Definitely a bit of dizziness at first, but after some concentration on taking full breaths and some hiking around through their preserve on pretty level ground, we were ready for more.  But was there more?  Why couldn’t we hike here?

Across the road from the Information Center there was a guardrail, but those sure looked suspiciously like trails behind that.  We asked, and the woman said that of course she would not stop us from going over there, though it was not up to her to give us information about it.  Maybe a liability thing?  Anyway, we went over there and read a few signs and realized it was all state land and we could do what we wanted on it (including hunting, camping, and dirt-biking) as long as we went by a few back-country rules (the waitress at Big Island Brewhaus had told us gleefully about a friend of hers who went dirt-biking on Mauna Kea and got his face ripped off when he crashed … they put it back).

So all right, we decided to go not for a long hike, but to try to get to somewhere where we could see out better.  We still weren’t feeling overly nimble or energetic because of the lack of oxygen, but we toured around some and then climbed halfway up one of the biggest cinder cones.  I still have dust on my boots from that walk on Mauna Kea … Sarah’s camera says we got up very close to 10,000 feet.

And though we didn’t really get the panoramic and ocean views we were hoping for, we sure could see a long way out there when we got a bit higher.  The dominant feature was of course Mauna Loa, the other mountain.  It’s strange that it looked even bigger when we were also up high, just incredibly massive.  As usual, there was a very strong wind blowing from the Northeast (so strong I took my hat off so it wouldn’t blow away), and the same wind was happening over on Mauna Loa apparently.  But the massive peak split it in two and set it swirling, and it became clouds that then descended onto its little brother, Hualālai.  This had apparently been going on for a long, long time and there was nothing Hualālai could do about it, it was just stuck in Mauna Loa’s jetstream.

We had meandered slowly and it was probably about 90 minutes later when we got back.  We were all decided at that point that we weren’t going to drive up any further.  The displays at the information center convinced us that our car might not be up to it, and we’d been having a tough enough time at 10,000 feet, we hated to think what 14,000 would be like.

So after filling up on water at the drinking fountain, we got back in the car and started the long descent.  Sad to say goodbye to the mountains, but we had a long way to go before our last goodbyes tomorrow.  Our plan was to detour on to the old Saddle Road at the split and then to continue into Waimea, where we could have a late lunch at the Big Island Brewhaus.

It used to be that the Saddle Road had a reputation for accidents, dangerous switchbacks and sight lines, and hard driving conditions.  But when the new Saddle Road (Inouye Highway) was completed, it became routine to traverse the Island that way.  When we branched off onto the old Saddle Road we found out what they were talking about!  The road dropped down very sharply, not well-graded at all, and soon it was hugging the transition line between the desert, Wyoming-like country on the left with lots of bleak dirt/rock and scattered clumps of plants, and the lusher ranch country on the right, extending up the lower slopes of Mauna Kea and later the slopes of Kohala.  As often happened during the trip, it suddenly started raining, the clouds closed us in, and visibility dropped, though it was still bright up above.

Well, we made it to Waimea anyway, up on its shoulder of Kohala, and there was a place in the Brewhaus parking lot for us.  They were pretty full again, even in the middle of the afternoon on a Thursday, but we got a nice table outside in the half-sun and half-shade of their patio, and got some more of their great beers and one last great seafood meal.  Our waitress from the night before greeted us merrily, she was wearing a Red Sox hat (only one I saw on the trip)!  And speaking of Boston sports, we checked out the Bruins and they had swept their series with Carolina, winning the last game 4-0!

Oh well, one more fond farewell when we finally finished up there (I had bought a hat from them the day before).  If we had to settle anywhere on the Big Island, it would probably be up in Kohala or the Hāmākua coast, and we would definitely be regulars at the Big Island Brewhaus.

We wanted to go down a road we hadn’t been on before and so turned to the right in downtown Waimea and then stayed left at the fork down the Kawaihae Road, which dropped pretty precipitously itself, gave us some last beautiful views of the Pacific off Kohala, and then spat us out on the coast, just about where we had started our explorations on Saturday at Puʻukoholā Heiau.

From there we turned left on Queen K Highway and headed back to the Resort area.  Didn’t go in there quite yet though, we turned West again up Waikoloa Drive so we could go back to Waikoloa Village to gas up in preparation for returning the car, and get some granola bars for backup for the plane ride the next day.

Then one last time trying to get into the Hilton Waikoloa parking lot, finding a space, and dragging everything up into the lobby through the oppressive heat.  Another long walk to the Ocean Tower.  Dave went directly back to the room while Sarah and I took a short detour into the grand Ocean Tower lobby to look around.  We hadn’t done that before.  They have a very nice manicured lawn beyond it and areas for group functions.  We shuddered to think how insanely busy the whole place must get at full operating capacity.

We had wandered around the upper floors of the Ocean Tower a few days before, Dave and I had skulked through the far reaches around the pool to the South, and we had pretty much explored all of the Resort, including the convention space on the lower floors.  One thing we hadn’t inspected was the lobby of the Palace Tower, but that might have been too much.  And Sarah hadn’t been on the boat!  But if we never see that Resort again, I won’t miss it a bit.

Well anyway, got back to the room and started the huge job of packing for our return journey.  Actually, it went more smoothly than we’d expected.  We’d done a great job of managing foodstuffs, etc. so we were just about out of everything.  We’d been kind of forced to be tidy about storing dirty clothes vs. still-clean clothes because of the lack of bureau space, and this meant we could pretty much empty the drawers right into the suitcase.  We’d stored a lot of stuff in the closet too, such as the snorkeling gear and extra towels, but that went on top and we were done!  What remained we would put in our carry-on packs the next day.

So one last sunset on the balcony, and then it was time for dinner.  Again, our choices were pretty limited but we figured we’d go back to the Tropics Ale House.  It couldn’t be worse than it had been on Saturday night!  And in a flash of brilliance, we realized this meant we could bring the full suitcases out to the car now and not have to do it in the morning.

Of course, the one time the tram might have come in handy, it was nowhere in sight.  And so we wheeled our big suitcases all the way back down the Museum Walkway, which was a fitting rite of farewell.  I’m sure I’m going to have nightmares about walking that path over and over and over.  Though it had some interesting objets d’art in it, enough was enough.

One last stroll through the neighborhood over to the Tropics Ale House, and the same waitress we had had Saturday was really glad to see us back, and really glad to tell us that all their beers were now on.  So this was a nice little way to wrap up that sub-plot.  Had a decent last Big Island meal there … I got a salad since I’d been eating so much fish lately.

And when we got back to the Hilton Waikoloa, the full moon was burning in the sky, and the boat was there!  Sarah had not yet been on the silly little boat they ran up and down the Resort in parallel to the tram, and we couldn’t pass up this opportunity.  It’s a change, though as mentioned, it isn’t really a nautical adventure.

Back to the Boat Landing in the Ocean Tower and up to the room one last time.  It was getting pretty late by then and we knew we’d have to get up earlier than we had been the next morning, so it wasn’t long before bedtime.

The Hāmākua Coast

Wednesday May 15

Oh no, we suddenly were way past the half-way point in our vacation and we had so much left to do!  One thing that had been very high on our list was to see the beautiful windward coast of the island, the Hāmākua coast.  And what we most wanted to see there was the Hawaii Tropical Botanical Garden, and Waipiʻo Valley.  And we wanted to see waterfalls.  The best, we were told, was the ʻAkaka Falls.  Could we get over to the other side of the Saddle Road and see all three of these in one day?

Oh, and arguably more important than any of these things, we needed to visit the Big Island Brewhaus and Tako [sic] in Waimea, which we had already identified as our kind of town.  Jeez, this was almost enough to make you want to go back to bed!

But we didn’t go back to bed, we did the frozen yogurt breakfast thing one more time (the last of the granola, great timing), and saddled up for the Saddle Road and beyond.  Another morning on our balcony, then packing up for a day of everything, then getting smacked in the face by the heat and humidity up on the 4th floor of the Ocean Tower, and then down the long perp walk to the refilling station and freedom.  Several people stopped by and said seriously, “You’re going out into the wide world again?  Don’t you realize you’re safe here?”  We kneed them in the macadamia nuts.

This time it was back up the Waikoloa Road for the 3-mile transit over to the Daniel K. Inouye Highway (a.k.a. route 200, or the new Saddle Road), where we shot up into the sky, past just a few early-morning cars on another bright, beautiful day.  The clouds were doing their thing in the stiff Northeast trade wind, streaming off Mauna Loa down towards the leeward side of the Island.  We were up on top of the world again, with the surprising cinder cones, the Army base, and then the road downhill past more and more red plants and succulents.

It started raining again of course, on our way down mountain.  We were watching for the turnoff to the North side of Hilo, and with some confusion we found it.  The sun came back out (it had never been that far away) and the neighborhood turned more and more suburban, but we were still rolling steeply downhill.  Finally we got into the city itself and there was Jackie Rey’s Hilo location!  Looked a lot more upscale than what we had been at last night.

We turned left when we got to the ocean, up the coast, back on the Hawaiʻian Belt Road, known as route 19 here.  We were looking for Hawaii Tropical Botanical Garden in lovely Onomea Bay, and we needed some help from the Google Maps lady since the road there was closed!  She stunningly had no difficulty at all with Hawaiʻian place names and had us turned around and approaching it from the North soon enough.

HTBG is nestled into a beautiful niche in the cliffs on the Hāmākua coast and is a marvel.  It was the vision of a retired couple (Dan and Pauline Lutkenhouse, Pauline is still alive), and they succeeded in hacking an incredible place out of that wild, hard coast.  It’s an overflowing garden of tropical plants in a natural valley, leading down to an impossibly picturesque cove in the wilds of the windward side of Hawaiʻi.  They used to ship sugar out of the harbor, but the sugar plantations are long gone and just the scenery remains.

On other vacations, we’ve seemed to get to places before the crowds, but on this vacation we were often right at the cusp of the crowds.  As described, finding the way in took some doing, but we were on the right road and then we realized we were in a formation of 5 cars, all heading for this magical place.  We got one of the last parking spaces in their small lot, in what might become the shady side later on (we hoped), and then checked out their gift shop and bathrooms.

Sarah got a shirt, but there wasn’t much else there that was appealing besides entrance tickets.  They had free loaner umbrellas and were encouraging people to buy mosquito repellent and water when they bought their tickets.  We declined all three since we were already prepared.  Little sidelight here: we read that several places on Hawaiʻi called for mandatory bug spray, and so we were equipped.  But in every place with a mosquito/bug warning (like the depths of the tropical garden), when we got there, we just laughed.  The few bugs that were there were much more interested in the flowers and the fallen fruit than us.  This was supposed to be serious bug country??  Had these people ever been to Maine in June?  Jeez, we could have given cute names to the few mosquitoes we saw.

Anyway, we got our tickets (@$20 but well worth it), sprayed and sunscreened,  and started down the steep walkway into the gardens.  And we were instantly surrounded by marvels.  I don’t know how to describe how wonderful that place was.  It had about half and half “domestic” plants and “exotic” plants, but Hawaiʻi is the newest land on Earth, so really everything there is exotic, including people.  Whatever, this is just an incredible spot and I’m not equipped to describe the plants, trees, and bushes that we saw, let alone the mosses surrounding the graceful waterfall in the stream that has formed the gorge.  If you’re ever in the area, this is a place you have to see.  The guidebook said that people spent as much as 2 hours there.  We finally emerged after three hours and had to tear ourselves away.

Though I’m not going to try to describe the plants we saw, I’ll make one exception, the Monkeypod trees.  Some of these specimens (they must have been very old) were the tree that’s always been lurking at the back of my dreams.  I just stood there and stared up, at a loss for words.  The canopies are massive and enveloping and they reach from horizon to horizon, but they’re translucent and the sun shines through.  And they’re so subtly green and yellow brown and … no, none of this is coming anywhere near describing them.  They reminded me of the man in the yellow hat.

OMG, after a long morning down that winding garden path, with Onomea Bay just blissing us out when we got down the steep gorge to it (I would have loved to go kayaking there), we made it back up the hill to the parking lot in the tropical heat and humidity.  The sun was blaring straight down and the humidity was peaking.  We were pretty tired and hungry at that point but there was nowhere to sit out of the sun.  We got our PB&G sandwiches out of the car and wolfed them down, while standing in what shade we could get out of the overhanging plants in the parking lot.  What a morning that had been!

OK, time to start up Hector, crank the air conditioning, and head on up the raw Hāmākua coast.  Next stop was ʻAkaka Falls State Park, way up mauka to the left, through miles of yellow and hilly old sugar-cane land that now just held a few lazy cows.

Pulled in there and took all our valuables out of the car (except the water, which was probably actually the most valuable), and cracked the windows.  The guidebook had told us that at many places in Hawaiʻi you don’t want to leave anything valuable in your car, and in fact you want to leave it unlocked so toughs don’t feel the need to break in, looking for things to steal.  We left the doors unlocked at ʻAkaka Falls as advised, and this may have been wise.  For some reason, this State Park seemed to attract a different kind of tourist than we’d seen elsewhere.  Most of the visitors seemed to be locals or people vacationing on the cheap.

Paid our $5 parking fee to the lazy ticket guy, who didn’t like to be disturbed by people actually paying the admission price.  And then we had another wonderful time dropping into their valley and seeing Kahūnā Falls and the wonderful ʻAkaka Falls itself.  This is a free-dropping waterfall of 420 feet in an incredibly lush tropical setting, closed in by lava cliffs and surrounded by steep, steep slopes of light green plants.

To tell you the truth, we’d seen so many incredible things that another waterfall was not hugely exciting for me.  I’ve seen waterfalls and this was not a large volume of water, though it was an impressive drop.  The most fun thing was the plant life along the trail.  We saw the most incredible banyan tree there, like a medieval village unto itself.  It was so dominant it even spanned the trail and dropped some large roots down, over on the other side.

There was a little bit of people watching delight too:

• Young man, struggling to put the experience into words: “You ever been zip-lining?”
• Eager girlfriend, stunned that he said anything at all: “No!”
• Young man, dismissively: “Drop your phone, and it’s *gone.*”

OK, we got back to the parking lot and Hector was doing all right.  A couple of feral cats hung around, perhaps waiting to see if we’d leave any food.  But we didn’t.

Next up was Waipiʻo Valley, way up the coast.  Well it wasn’t way, way up.  Hilo to Waimea is just 55 miles, so these sights were in stunning proximity.  Going up the coast was a lovely drive, a succession of bridges spanning impossible valleys with the ocean swelling off to the right.  It seemed that every time we glimpsed the ocean, or got a full view, it was at a different angle.  Must be that it was us that was at the different angle, and the ocean stayed static … maybe.  As mentioned, we were always going up or down, and sometimes this got confusing.

Anyway, the Belt Road (route 19) curved off to the West in the charming town of Honoka'a, and we stayed straight, continuing up the coast.  It was at about this point that I decided I needed a cup of coffee, bad.  I don’t know what it was, but I was suddenly falling asleep, like Dorothy in the poppy fields.  And that’s not good when you’re driving up a vertiginous coast you’ve never navigated before.

We stopped at a diner in the charming town of Honoka'a and they offered to make a pot of coffee, but I declined, thinking that there must be a place that already had some coffee ready for me.  We parked right in the middle of TCTO Honoka'a and walked a block or two, and there it was, Hina Rae’s Café.  I asked Hina (or her stunt double) if she had an iced coffee and she admitted that she did.  I got a large and Sarah and Dave both got regulars, all black.  And she had them ready in a cat’s whisker.  We were probably the last customers of the day there and she already showed some signs about closing up soon, but this was the most mellow, low pressure place you could imagine.  We tipped her and thanked her profusely, then got back in the car and got back on the road.  We sipped our coffees and noticed that not only were they incredibly good, she had made them with coffee ice cubes!

You can read a lot of hype about Waipiʻo Valley, it’s supposedly one of the most beautiful places on Earth.  To really experience it you need to go down into it and ideally hike over towards the next valley.  This part of the Hāmākua coast extends up into the Kohala Forest Preserve that we’d been at on Saturday, and if you hiked a bit more (and spent a few nights), you’d come out in beautiful Pololū Valley, where we’d been Saturday.

We knew we wouldn’t have anywhere near enough time to hike down into it (or drive into it if we’d had 4-wheel drive).  But we were totally happy looking at it from the overlook and imagining what it must be like.  There was a little park at the overlook and the views were fantastic.  Several people were just standing there staring, like they were never going to move, and we joined them for a while.  A couple of feral cats were there too, wishing the people would just leave and leave some scraps of food behind.  There were a couple of local families eating dinner at the picnic tables in the shade, but we tourists mostly got in and got out.

Wow, this was another beautiful spot.  I don’t know if it was shame on us that we didn’t spend much time there.  We just snapped a few pictures and then left.  We had come all the way across the world (a quarter of the world, geographically) to see this, and it definitely made it somewhere up on our list of greatest Hawaiʻi hits.  But we saw it and left … we had other things to do.

The other things we had to do were to get to Waimea for dinner and then at some point get back off the mountain (we knew Waimea was not at the top but was definitely on Kohala, having been through there the other day), and get back to sea level on the other side of the Island.

The first thing we had to do was to get back through the charming town of Honoka'a.  We made a sharp right in town and climbed the hill up towards the Belt Road.  Once we got back there it wasn’t too much farther into Waimea (the Belt Road was now known as the Mamalahoa Highway), though it suddenly became rush hour and cars were streaming out of town.  We had the GPS set to the Big Island Brewhaus and Tako but by the time we got there the parking lot was full!  Luckily they had signs telling us to go a few streets over and park under the cherry trees and that’s what we did, though that was pretty full up too.

Suddenly very windy and a bit chilly on the slopes of Kohala when we left the car, but when we got to the Brewhaus they had a table indoors that was just right.

Yikes, this was another excellent restaurant, though if you don’t like beer you might not think so.  Besides having a few clues that the owner was a Deadhead, they had a great list of their own beers and an eclectic menu.  I got an ahi pizza, because who’d ever heard of an ahi pizza??  And it was fantastic.  I also loved their Pelagic IPA, and we also tried their Overboard IPA, Hoptopia IPA, Dark Sabbath tripel, and White Mountain Porter (Mauna Kea means white mountain), which is made with coconut and Kona coffee and is amazing.

Oh boy, we didn’t want to leave once again.  But we finally got out of there and found our car a few streets over under the now almost dusky cherry trees.  It was still kind of chilly up on the mountain, though by New England standards maybe not.  Got back in the car and headed down the hill towards the coast and WOW!

We were steaming down the hill with Kohala behind us and suddenly realized what we were looking at.  There were multiple dark clouds streaming by in the early evening light, with the sun getting near the horizon out to the West.  But they were timed to afford us views of all the mountains around us.  Behind us was the bulk of Kohala, the steep mountain with impossibly green slopes.  To our left was Mauna Kea and we could see all the way up to the top, where the observatories gleamed in the light.  At just about 11:00 was the massive, massive bulk of Mauna Loa, stretching up into the sky and somehow fading into the distance.  In the foreground was the suddenly revealed bulk of Hualālai.  We hadn’t ever seen the whole mountain until that point, because it was always shrouded by the clouds spun off by Mauna Loa, but that evening it was naked.  And to the right we were getting the classic, spectral view of Haleakalā across the strait, 80 miles away on Maui.  We were in the middle of 5 majestic mountains, all bathed in the evening light.  This was *the* most breathtaking sight of the whole vacation, and pretty close to the most beautiful I’ve ever seen in nature.

Well, what can you say after something like that?  We got back to the Waikoloa Road turnoff and sped downhill to the Resort.  Do you think any of these people down here had looked up and marveled at the mountains that afternoon?  Well, maybe.  Anyway, we had to walk the Museum Walkway like all of them.

OK, back to our room and it was still barely light.  Time for some gawking out over the Pacific while we calmed down, and then another rummy game to put us to sleep.