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Incredible Tale of Trust at Kings Shops in Waikoloa
Hitachi tree on golf course on the water by Kings’ Shops in Waikoloa
I did not start out yesterday intending to end up at the Kings Shops in Waikoloa. The day began as an adventure, in a totally different direction. There is nothing like a good adventure, exploring new space systems. In fact, one of the reasons that selling real estate has held its appeal with me over the past 40-some years is because I love adventure, and no two days are ever alike in the real estate business.
For lack of anything else to do, I turned on my Ingress program on my iPad and noted, whoa, there were a bunch of uncaptured portals all clustered together around the back side of the resort. To reach the 12th Level in Ingress, I need one more gold medal, which could be achieved if I capture another 80 or so portals, bringing my total to 1,000 captured portals. What the hey! I followed the shortest path to the portals and found myself navigating the employee entrance.
The mountain side was bathed in clouds, fading off in the distance, like it was another country, looming above miles of turned over lava chunks. Mongooses scooted. Silence. No cars, no people, just fields of lava. Dried weeds. Hot sun. A good place to bury a body. Then suddenly, I was back in civilization, paved parking lot, lots of vehicles and up the hill barriers of vegetation. I found an opening through the flowers and emerged on a public street, right there at the Kings Shops in Waikoloa.
Be still my heart. Coach. Tiffany. Na Hoku, Michael Kors, Maui Divers and more. Shop after shop. My holiday shopping was not yet completed, not to mention I had not bought myself any present this year for Christmas, unless you count my 3 week wor-cation on Big Island. I love buying gifts for people, especially for my team and transaction coordinator, who are like precious gifts from heaven to me. They make it possible for me to get away and take trips. I rarely go shopping in Sacramento, so I don’t spend much.
Kohala Coast Fine Art sells artwork and hand-crafted jewelry at Kings Shops
Hello, Kohala Coast Fine Art. After much discussion with the clerk, selected a handful of beautiful items as gifts and threw in a couple of pieces of jewelry for myself. This is when I discovered that I did not bring much cash nor a credit card because I had not planned on shopping. A lonely $20 bill in my wristlet and no identification. I continued chatting like nothing was unusual, and the clerk rang up the total. When she asked for my VISA, I had to come clean that I did not have a credit card with me. However, I do know the number, the expiration date and the secret code because, like I mentioned earlier, I live in Sacramento. My stores are primarily online.
Blown away — she rang up my purchases and handed over the bag. This is when I couldn’t help my astonishment and questioned her: hey, I don’t want to call undue attention to this, but I don’t have any identification. I don’t have a credit card. Why are you trusting me to walk out with all of this merchandise when I could be a con artist, a professional thief? She said I don’t look like a thief. Hey, I’m exactly what a thief would look like, somebody you don’t expect to be a thief!
Multi-million waterfront homes on golf course across from Kings Shops in Waikoloa
By now it was lunch time. There were more stores at Kings Shops in Waikoloa to visit, but my stomach was growling. I did not have enough cash for lunch. I also did not want to walk back to the hotel. Instead, I entered Three Fat Pigs. Spied a BLT on sourdough for $14. Lots of house sparrows pecked about on the ground as the waiter seated me outside. A beautiful yellow bird landed in the tree and eyed me suspiciously. This is a restaurant on a private lake, with multi-million homes across the water and a rolling golf course.
“How much is a diet Coke?” I asked. The answer: $4.00. Oh! My eyes glanced down at the menu and then back up at the server. “I only asked because all I have is $20 and I want to make sure I have enough to leave a good tip,” I said. I did not think they would take a credit card charge from me without my credit card.
The server said he would not charge me for a diet Coke, and brought me a tall glass of coke with a maraschino cherry! How lucky is that! I mean, what were the odds? The server took pity on me. This made my day. I was so excited that after lunch I went to Coach and blew a wad on more gifts. I even bought my husband a Hanukkah present, which had to be ordered and when it arrives, the sales clerk will bring it to my hotel room.
All in all, I bought merchandise at four stores at Kings Shops in Waikoloa, spent thousands and nobody asked for identification nor required my credit card. Isn’t that incredible in this day and age?
I think my sister Margie is right. I do have a guardian angel who follows me around and takes care of me. People do want to do nice things for me without much effort on my part. I’m just really lucky, I guess, and very fortunate. Or, at least that’s my story and I’m sticking to it.
Dependable Agents You Can Rely Upon Are Few
View from balcony of cabana on Big Island.
Who can you depend on in your life when you really need to depend on an agent? Well, it goes without saying that if I am your Sacramento Realtor, you can depend on me. I am one of those incredibly dependable agents my clients rely on. I do habitual things with regularity, which is why my husband always knows where I am and what I am doing. I’m not sure that is necessarily a good thing, now that I reflect on it. Sort of removes the mystery from life but after almost 20 years of marriage, there is not a lot of mystery lurking about in our relationship.
Naturally, I wish everybody were dependable agents like me, but they aren’t. You’ve got to make allowances for that and for possible screw ups by others. Like when I called the taxi company, a cooperative I always reserve for transportation to the airport because they are reliable. They might smoke cigars and not speak a lot of English but they utilize GPS and have always been on time. Except for this particular trip to Hawaii. They were supposed to be at my house at 5:30 AM. They were not.
I called at 5:35 and was informed the person who took the reservation over the phone made me an appointment for January 1 instead of December 1. The cab company immediately pulled a driver from another call that morning and sent him over. As a result, he was 15 minutes late. But I didn’t really need to leave for the airport until 5:45 and had already accounted for the possibility of error.
When I arrived at my hotel in Big Island, I had already ordered a bottle of champagne for my room which was chilling on ice. I also had requested spa services for the following day. Received confirmation from the hotel on both. But when I showed up at the spa, there was no record of my reservation. See, you can’t rely on customer service departments to actually provide accurate services, even if you have it in writing. No dependable agents working here.
I imagine there will be a free service provided as I’m not on a schedule here on Big Island. I have a blog to finish, a couple of CMAs to follow up on and an escrow to update, then I am off to the beach. You can see the beach from my balcony above. First, there is the fish pond, and then the beach. That view can help to remove some of the frustration when people don’t do what they promise to do. Plus, I can make sure I don’t do it to anybody else.
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.
Back Home in Sacramento is a Return to a Normal Pace
Tourists at Hapuna Beach Prince Hotel
One way to really appreciate your home in Sacramento is to leave it for a while and go stay in a musty hotel room on the beach in Hawaii where the highlight of the entire week was a group of tourists showing up out of nowhere, carting serious camera equipment. Wow, big excitement on the beach. The upside was a much needed rest and I got to finish reading a couple of books. Plus, there is no denying that 3 trips to the spa are almost enough to work out all the kinks and creaks.
Donna, my server, at the Coast Grille made my vacation a delight. The Hapuna Beach Prince should give Donna a big fat raise. She was always in a good mood, smiling, and she would listen to me describe the type of experience I expected to encounter, and she made sure it happened. I could ask about items on the menu, and by the end of 8 days, she knew me well enough to say with an air of certainty that I would not like XYZ but I would probably love ABC.
That will probably all go away soon, though.
Because the newest thing now in restaurants is the food delivery system being introduced at Eatsa in San Francisco. You walk into a barren restaurant, choose the meals and accouterments you desire, pay for it on an iPad screen and then wait while it is delivered by unseen hands to a window where you retrieve your tray or box. Robot food. Not really fast food. Robot food. It doesn’t matter that human hands prepare it if there is no discussion, no interaction, all because now human contact is too expensive.
The other thing I really liked about my resort in Hawaii was the spa at Hapuna Beach Prince Hotel. Especially the coconut scrub / Swedish / lomilomi massage special. It will take me a while to build up more knots in my neck and back now that I’m back home.
But last night I got to sleep in my own bed, hug my own husband, pet my own cats, and return to a normal life. After all of my numerous trips, I’m having second thoughts about ever wanting to spend time in Hawaii for any length of time without my home in Sacramento being there. I miss home when I’m away. And I’m very glad to be back in Sacramento.
Phone booths in Hawaii that actually work
