10 to 14 June 2011

Waikiki

I couldn’t figure out why all those Australians were hootin’ and hollerin’ so much over an NBA Finals game until I remembered that we weren’t in Australia anymore and those Australians were actually Americans.  Such has been the feeling over the past few days in Hawaii, stopping at times to think hard about where I am.  There are, of course, moments when I’ve no doubt where I am, such as when in the hotel lobby eating breakfast to the sounds of CNN blathering on about the Republican debate.  Just like moving to Australia in March with the resultant back-to-back winters may not have been our best move, I’m now thinking returning to the States before a Presidential Election is a tad on the bone-headed side too.  Perhaps it’s a blessing after all that we have no television to come back to, one more victim in our pre-Australia downsizing war.

What’s been happening here in Hawaii is a whole lot of nothing.  Not typically our style but it seems we’ve come down with the travel fatigue bug.  It’s an illness we’ve had touches of before (think tent camping in New Zealand for 38 days or endless bowls of Pho in Vietnam).  This time it started with a trip accompanied by neither guidebook nor plan.  This is when we knew we were coming down with the bug but we tried to act like we weren’t getting sick saying, Ahh, we’ll just look stuff up on the web.  This is like taking Vitamin C for the stomach flu.  Before we knew it, we had full blown symptoms – lounging on our comfy hotel beds, watching the 42″ television as though we’d never seen such talking images before, and venturing no further than the beaches just outside the hotel.  Thinking if we weren’t rolled over soon we’d get bed sores, we finally medicated our illness with a hike up Diamond Head and a day trip to beaches 30 miles away.  I think we’re on the mend now, with the possible minor setback of a few sunburned bits.  And speaking of sun, we plan on bringing some of it along with us when we fly back to Seattle tomorrow.