Day 1: Into Hawaiian territory.
The day started at 6:05am, when my plane landed at the Daniel K Inouye International Airport. But I wasn’t to stay here for long – I’m on a connecting flight to Kauai. Here time warps a bit, in many ways. Firstly, the airport looked the same as it had in my last visit (2006), and the buildings looked like they have been maintained to keep a 1960s look. Is this an example of “island time”? Secondly, knowing that Honolulu’s airport is tiny compared to some others, I thought 2 hours would be easily enough for me to transfer my luggage to the intra-island terminal and grab a nice cooked breakfast. No. By the time (I think) I did a forced scenic tour of the airport, there wasn’t enough time for the cafe/bar staff to cook. But there was enough time to pour a mimosa. A victim of the circumstances, I had a bubbly for breakfast. 😀
The rest of the day was spent hiking around the Sleeping Giant trail, with my welcome party of Amanda Wylie, Paulie Webster and Linda Ng. They literally picked me up from the airport, and we went hiking before I got to the condo. Note the word “around”. Normally, people hike up a trail, see the scenery from up high, and then back down. But we were a different breed. Led by the creativity of Amanda, we, in Amanda’s words “tickled his ribs, rubbed his tummy, crawled up his neck & picked his nose then walked down his left knee before realising we were walking down the wrong leg.”. In non-hiking-technical terms, we got lost several times and hiked over double the distance and time!
The scenery was amazing & at least we lived to tell the tale. The day finished with beers, cheese and drifting off into the warm Kauai night…
