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Mauna Loa and the Limo Driver on Big Island
Flying over a deserted island on the way to Big Island
The trouble with making airline reservations months in advance is you do all of this research for the best direct flights or minimum layovers and the airlines manage to change it on you at the last minute. I try to eliminate any kind of discomfort when traveling or at least minimize it, so it’s kinda disturbing when they mess with your schedule. Still, when I think how my 40-minute layover in Honolulu turned into 3 hours because of flight time changes, I have to admit that things could be worse; I could have gone to Moscow or the North Pole instead of Big Island. Stuff could always be worse. Mauna Loa could erupt.
My limo driver was on time. He gave the Shaka to a guy on the other side of the baggage carousel. He told me that the Hawaiian hand signal, the folded-up 3 fingers with extended thumb and pinky came from a native Hawaiian who lost his 3 fingers. I always thought it was some sort of surfer dude thing or “party party” deal but what do I know? I’m not sure that is a true story. But I looked it up and Mental Floss credits it to a Hawaiian in the 1950s or 1960s who lost his 3 fingers, Hamana Kalili. So, could be true.
I’ll tell you what is not true, and that’s the limo driver’s belief that the volcano will never erupt. I’m not talking about Kilauea, obviously, as that routinely seems to pour down near Puna. I’m talking about Mauna Loa. It has erupted 33 times since 1843, and the last 2 big eruptions were in 1950 and 1984. Isn’t it overdue? I asked the driver.
He shook his head and laughed. Said it is unlikely to erupt because of all the building and new construction happening on Big Island. They wouldn’t build new homes in the path of a lava flow, he exclaimed. I stared at the back of his head from my seat, tried to catch his eyes in the rear view mirror. My mouth fell open. Was he joking? Hell, yes, they’d build in the path of a volcano eruption, they are developers, and once they’ve got your money, they don’t CARE!
He was shocked to hear this. Well, the good news is lava doesn’t flow very fast, I assured him. I mean, it wouldn’t be like Pompeii. You’d have plenty of time to evacuate.
He thought about that for a moment and then replied, “Yeah, if Hawaiians saw Mauna Loa was erupting and they were in the middle of a football game, you can bet they would finish the football game.”
Brrr . . . Time to Work from Hawaii
Elizabeth Weintraub in Oakland holding mandarins to her ears for no good reason.
It was chilly in the Bay area over Thanksgiving, as evidenced by the photo of me with the mandarins in Oakland. Yet, as the cold snap heads into Sacramento and Christmas lights are springing up, it can mean only one thing for this Sacramento Realtor: it is time to work from Hawaii. Yup, due to state-of-the-art technology, I can list Sacramento real estate just as easily from my home office in Land Park as I can from a cabana on the ocean at Big Island, so I am off to Hawaii this morning.
After trying to stuff my snorkel gear into my smaller luggage, it dawned on me that not only would it fit oh-so-much better into my larger luggage, but because I’m not traipsing about the South Pacific this year and won’t have to maneuver my own luggage by myself at all, I can pack a much LARGER suitcase. Eureka. Packing is done. No rolling of clothes and sitting on my luggage, tugging on the zipper, ripping the skin off my fingers in doing so. Plop, plop, plop, all packed. Yup, time to work from Hawaii.
Then I realized I had not yet received an email from Hawaiian Airlines announcing the time to check in. That was odd. I went to the Hawaiian Airlines website to print my boarding pass, and it wouldn’t let me sign in. A banner noted the airline had unilaterally decided to change customer passwords. I chose a new password and tried again. Nope, they required more digits, more letters and a weird combination. I hate being told what to do. But if I wanted to sign in to Hawaiian and get my boarding pass, well, must conform. I’m pretty irritated with them by now, when the horrifying thought occurred to me what if the reason I didn’t get an email was because I booked a flight for 2016 and not 2015?
My ergonomic keyboard sometimes causes me to mistype because the 5 and 6 are within the same reach on the left, and no matter how long I’ve had this keyboard, I can’t adjust. I want to type a 6 with my right finger. It’s embedded in my brain. What if I royally screwed up? But my luck is pretty good, and no, I did not make a mistake. I found my reservation. What I did not realize was the airline had changed the departure time. I had chosen a leisurely time to depart, a time that would let me sleep in, but no, Hawaiian changed it, and now I have to be at the airport at 6 AM.
If that’s the worst thing, it’s OK. Because it’s time to work from Hawaii.
Abalone and Purchase Offers Are Hot in Hawaii
View from dinner at the Coast Grille, Hapuna Beach Prince Hotel
All it takes in the Sacramento real estate business sometimes is to leave town and your real estate business will suddenly heat up. The reason I chose this particular time period to visit Hawaii is because of Labor Day, reasoning that things will be fairly quiet and not quite so hectic. Of course, homes that for one reason or another have been difficult to sell are suddenly HOT. I’ve received offers for 3 of those homes. And one of them has multiple offers.
It means I will lie on the beach later today and not quite so early as I normally would, but that’s perfectly fine. I can hardly complain that I’m typing away on my computer when the view just over the monitor is of those fragrant Tahiti trees and rolling surf pounding the shore.
Later today I have a lomilomi massage lined up and a crabfest tonight, so you’ll probably hear about that tomorrow, while I move into the events from yesterday. First, my room has a somewhat musty smell, no wonder since it’s located the other side of the South 40. I am as far away as a person can get from the main activities. I checked at the front desk to see if there was a better room available and was offered a room with queen beds, but the same room with queen beds instead of a king wasn’t enough to make me pack up everything and move. Besides, that room has been overly deodorized and it smelled terrible.
I can settle the issue by opening all of my windows and balcony doors and leaving them that way. Problem solved. They checked the filter and it is brand new. The carpeting is new. The room has been remodeled, and the poor maintenance guy had to listen to me carry on about why didn’t they install hardwood flooring when they remodeled or hang drapes over the plantation shutters? Well, that’s probably why this hotel is rated 4-star and not a 5-star hotel.
It seems every time I deviate from a 5-star there are disappointments. But I can find things wrong with 5-star hotels as well. LOL.
Marinated abalone sliced in the shell and served on a bed of sea greens.
Check out the abalone I had for dinner last night in the photo above. This was an incredible dish that I almost did not order because abalone are endangered and I prefer to support sustainable fishing. I was assured this particular abalone is renewable and farmed locally, not grown in the wild. It was marinated, meaning it was raw, and complemented by a spicy sauce, sliced very thin. I waited until I was down to the last forkful before shooting a photo.
I considered taking the shell with me but that wasn’t a practical thought. Seriously, what would I do with an abalone shell?
A Summer Rain in Kona is Still a Delightful Hawaiian Vacation
Elizabeth Weintraub at the breezeway of Coast Grille Restaurant in Hawaii.
Living in a paradisiacal state of mind for some people is utopia but not very realistic. I’m more the cup is overflowing sort of person than the cup is half full, but even I know that sometimes you’ve got to deal with a little rain before the sun comes out. I could not believe, however, that my hotel required a $30 deposit on an umbrella. That seems a little bit excessive and makes me wonder about the types of people who visit the island of Hawaii and why they feel compelled to make off with a four-foot instrument that would most certainly break if one clobbered a bellman over the head with it.
We’ve had a little bit of showers yesterday afternoon, a summer rain, in an area of Hawaii that rarely sees rain. If you want to experience a lot of rain, you go to the eastern side of the island of Hawaii, which is OK and lushly beautiful except for those darned singing tree frogs all night long.
There are times in Sacramento when I miss a summer rain because we don’t get rain in the summer either. We make up for it in the winter. During the summer, though, nada. The problem with rain is sometimes you get thunderstorms, and thunderstorms scare the bejesus out of me. If you want me to confess to a crime I did not commit, just strap me to a chair under a bare light bulb and fill the room with sounds of a thunderstorm, lightning rods, cracks in the sky, and I’ll admit to anything to make it stop.
But soft falling rain is delightful. Just not the heavy rain. Probably the most delightful soft misty rainfall I’ve ever had the pleasure of experiencing was in Ireland. It was so light and silky that it would not have astonished me to spot leprechauns dancing through the square in Dublin.
When I walked to dinner last night, to the restaurant at my hotel, it was a good 10-block hike from my suite. And very complicated, too. Walk 3 blocks to the elevator, and go down to floor two. Walk another 6 blocks and take the elevator to floor 8. Go through the lobby and around the corner to reach a third set of elevators and go down to floor 4, and then take the stairs to the restaurant. I feel like I need a GPS.
Fortunately, this particular restaurant, unlike Brown’s at the Fairmont Orchid, has a breezeway where guests can still dine outside if it’s raining. I enjoyed the theme for this month, which is Dragon Fruit. It comes in a dark cherry, a vanilla and a cotton-candy-pink version. The Dragon Fruit salad contained all 3 versions of this seedy fruit, along with Kamuela tomatoes, watermelon radish, and baby cucumbers, tossed with a garden citrus vinaigrette.
Grilled ono with Dragon Fruit salsa and pumpkin hash
The ono, pictured here, arrived with a Dragon Fruit salsa and pumpkin hash, surrounded by bits of exotic things — I can’t tell you what they were except mouthwatering. In my opinion, the chef glazed the ono a bit too long, and it made the soft, fleshy fish somewhat dry and tough. The waitress was very nice about it, and I almost didn’t even tell her except that she asked what I thought. She offered to take my photo earlier, and I didn’t want her to feel like I did not appreciate the meal, as it was lovely.
As I type this, an agent called to complain that her listing is on my Sacramento real estate website and she wants me to remove it this instant! LOL. As standard service, my website contains every agent’s listing in Sacramento, along with my own listings. Why do these agents not understand how the internet works? Just another day in paradise. I’ll be back home in 8 days.
