Ah, Hawaii. The place big enough that you aren’t likely to have time to see everything but small enough that you will see the same cute girl, on two different days, in two completely different places. The world is cruel, is it not?
My mother is horribly ill, meaning that we can’t do anything. I mean anything. We ca’t even leave the condo for a walk (well I can leave, but not my dad or my mum). It’s pissing me off - we fly all the way to Hawaii to be cooped up in a soviet-era condo. However, I can hand it one thing.
I have never walked across a golf green in my life. The first reason being I don’t have the money to play golf, the second being my interest in golf is similar to my interest in professional hair styling. However, last friday, the golf course (a full 18 holes) in front of our hotel shut down and the fences were taken down. It is still maintained since it’s still a perfectly good golf course and someone might want to buy it, but you don’t get kicked off for not paying. I can do cartwheels all the way across it (actually, I can’t. I just needed to throw that in). What were the highlights of the day? Well, for starters, we bumped into (literally, I stubbed my toe upon walking onto the property) a massive abandoned hotel. It’s called the Outrigger Keauhou Beach Resort. The grounds are perfectly maintained and there are security guards who we talked to and asked about the hotel (it shut down on Halloween).
From the grounds, we watched, astounded, as a 747-200 did an approach with the landing gear down from almost 5000 feet. That’s right. Five. Freaking. Thousand. Feet. Usually landing gear goes down around 1000.
Every story, however comedic in nature, must be crested with tragedy. This morning I woke up and wanted to listen to some music on my iPod, as well as read some of the things we were going to do out of the wonderful Hawaii: The Big Island Revealed app. To my dismay, I could not locate the iPod. Soon the entire hotel room was upside down (the earthquakes here are terrible), and still no iPod. I thought, “maybe it’s still in my pants from last night.” It wasn’t. But the pocket that the iPod was so cozily nested in has an iPod sized hole in the bottom, which means that either those son of a bitches at WestJet found it when cleaning the plane and chose not to try to contact the owner, it’s sitting on the tarmac being shredded by the engine of a 747, or any of the three places we were last night. There are literally only three places I could have lost it: airport, car rental, or hotel lobby. I pray it shows up.
On the other side of the news, I got some splendid photographs of some heritage totems near the Outrigger, as well as watched the tide start pouring in. I realized that one of the factors leading to the demise of the hotel could have been the Tsunami form Japan, which hit Kona pretty hard and destroyed a lot of businesses.
Costco here is brilliant. In Canada, you walk up to a big long counter and one person takes all the orders, then one person gives out all the food, and there is like a 2 person support staff in the kitchen. Here, there are 5 windows, each with a separate cash register.
After discussing the similarities between my stuffed hamster Hammy and an upturned hippo with my dad, we threw a pizza in the oven and enjoyed a nice cold fruit juice cup of (that sentence was poorly formed and I’m too lazy to fix it. Instead, I will now type half a paragraph of this). As I was sitting alone on our front porch finishing my last piece of pizza (number 11), I look up just in time to see a guy almost walk into our suite. I pipe up: “I think your’s is the next one over.” He responds: “Good man. We need more like you,” and returns to his condo. He came back to meet my father and I, and he’s from the next town over, Port Coquitlam, British Columbia. We come all the way to Hawaii and meet a guy from down the highway.
After dinner, I went inside and opened my briefcase, and my iPod fell out. Somehow, it had embedded itself into the side of the bag, between sewn layers of fabric, and morphed into the seventh dimension and conversed with beings from Europa (I made some of that up, namely the part about the layers of fabric). Anyways, I recovered my iPod. Conflict resolved, which means the drama is at an end, meaning that the story is over. Thanks for reading if you wasted your time doing so, and screw you if you didn’t!
