My View for Dinner on the Hawaii Island of Lanai

To talk about how I had to call housekeeping up to my room to push the button on the coffeemaker seems so incredibly insignificant to what’s happening with the winter storm in Sacramento. I’ve been reading the live news feed from the Sac Bee until I can’t look anymore at the downed trees, flooded streets and stalled cars. My email is piling up, yet I can’t avert my eyes. From where I sit at my hotel on the Hawaii island of Lanai, it looks like the polar opposite.

The woman in the room next to me is probably not from northern California. She went out on her balcony yesterday afternoon, just as the reservation people had left my suite, and started complaining at the top of her lungs. She didn’t spend all of this money to be staring at another building. I glanced in her direction and sure enough, my room has a spectacular view and hers definitely faces a building. If only she had been given the room one door down, she yelled. I closed my balcony door so she could hear it.

She seems to still be there this morning. For a hotel that is often booked solid during the holidays, there are not very many people out and about at the Four Seasons in Lanai. I’m not sure where they all go, but at some of the resorts, it’s common not to see people. The guests are generally invisible. Not that I’m complaining, mind you, because I know where hell resides, and it resides at the Hilton on the Big Island.

If you want to swim with the dolphins on the Big Island, you go to the Hilton. It’s like Disneyland. Tram cars take you to your room, down on the lower South 40. You have to wait in line to get on. People are elbow-to-elbow. Thousands of Texans all in one place. Does that sound pleasurable to you? It’s kid oriented, so maybe that’s another reason why it’s on the bottom of my list of places to go because screaming kids aren’t any better than that woman next door screaming about her room.

I guess the worst part of the storm in Sacramento has not yet arrived. Room service has though, and it’s time for breakfast. Then, I’ll probably take my iPad to the beach so I can monitor the storm and cross my toes that everybody is OK.