Email Elizabethrealtor vacation
Aloha Maui and Mahalo for My Summer Vacation
I know lots of successful people who never get away for a vacation, much less get to spend 10 days in the middle of the summer on Maui, and I am so incredibly grateful for the support of my team who allows this kind of escape. Sometimes luck is on your side. I can’t tell you anything of importance that happened, either. Because nothing happened. Except for the important part, the part where my friend and team member Barbara Dow and I have learned how to master the art of doing nothing. Aloha. It’s not easy.
You may scoff, but doing nothing is difficult. You might say give me a Budweiser and beach chair, and I’m good, but dollars to doughnuts after a few days of that and most people would go stark raving mad. It takes absolute concentration. Do you take off your sandals to run barefoot through burning sand or do you wear them part way and then leave them on the beach to be swept into the surf? How far out into the ocean is it safe to swim before a shark might eat you? Should you have lunch served on the lawn or on a restaurant terrace? These are the kinds of decisions we had to face every single day.
Fortunately, we are Sacramento real estate agents who make dozens of tough decisions all the time. We constantly guide our clients to make the correct decisions for themselves.
I feel like we are a solar battery that needs to get recharged every six months, no matter what. We will come home feeling completely rested and ready to face all of the exciting challenges that will surely face us over the next 6 months.
We might even sneak in one more stroll in the surf before our driver arrives to whisk us away to the airport. We have husbands and houses and pets and friends and careers waiting for us at home. But we’ll always have memories to treasure of 10 wonderful days perfecting the art of doing nothing in Maui. Aloha Maui.
Road to Hana from Wailea
We thought we had the Road to Hana tour from our home base in Wailea all planned out. I set my alarm on the clock radio at The Fairmont Kea. I called for a wakeup call at 5:45, followed by a 2nd wakeup call 15 minutes later. All of this was in addition to relying on my internal clock to wake up by early enough, because the last thing we wanted to do was be late for our 6:45 meeting time scheduled by the Road to Hana tour people.
As luck would have it, we raced out of our top floor suite at 6:30 without any wakeup calls whatsoever, on top of which the alarm clock had malfunctioned. We made it halfway down the hall before Barbara figured out she had left her cellphone on the table. We dashed back to retrieve her cell and continued on our way halfway through the second wing before I realized I had forgotten the tickets for the tour. What a circus. See, there was a reason that we had given ourselves an extra 15 minutes of time to meet the deadline. That’s the kind of real estate agents we are — planners — always on time. Back to the room to retrieve the tickets.
By the time we got to the Terrace level and rounded the corner where we were to meet the van, we discovered all of the other passengers were already on board, and even with being 5 minute early, we were still late. Which is probably why we got the last back corner seats.
617 curves, and 56 single-lane bridges. What part of motion sickness did I not predict? Oy. I could be stoic or I could speak up after 30 minutes of discomfort, and speaking up seemed like the better choice. I asked our cheery tour bus driver from Shakopee who, even though he has lived in Hawaii for 26 years still retained his Minnesota accent (don’t dingle dangle, hey) for a plastic bag. He was so polite he asked me what size. Size? Seriously? He spotted the look of agony in my eyes and quickly ripped off a kitchen-size trash bag. Then, he also handed me a piece of ginger, coupled with a frozen can of pop to alternate holding against my neck, under my ears.
My real life saver, though, was the guy sitting next to Barbara, who hailed from Bentonville, Arkansas, home of Wal*Mart and Tyson Foods, the fame of which I only know because of my agent friend, James Dray at Wise Realty. The dude from Bentonville handed me 2 dramamine. Jennifer, from St. Louis, was also gracious enough to offer us second row seats, which were a tremendous help.
By the time we got to the burial place of Charles Lindbergh, whom they say was buried standing straight up so he can look out to sea, all was right with the world again. On the road to Hana, sometimes you’ve got to rely on the kindness of strangers.
The Road to Hana Beats Out Ziplining in Maui
No trip to Maui appears complete unless you take the Road to Hana tour, with its 617 hairpin curves and 56 one-way bridges, which is our destination this morning. We had originally considered a Ziplining experience but that required a lot more energy than we seem to possess. Once you slow down in Maui, you slow waaaayyy down, so slow you almost crash and split your head open in the process. It’s amazing the fast pace at which we operate day-to-day in the wonderful world of Sacramento real estate.
Ziplining held appeal because it’s an activity that so many vacationers seem to gravitate toward and it looks harmless. Although, I did consider the fact that I could very easily climb up to the top of the tree before I completely freaked out. I imagine the view from the trees as I stand on our wrap-around balcony and look out at the ocean. We are on the 7th floor, which is the top floor at The Fairmont Kea Lani. Could I let myself be fastened to a harness, hold on to a wire and zoom down toward the ground?
I don’t know if I could. I am uneasy in a chairlift at a ski area, and this activity is faster and higher. In fact, I was pretty much unable to ski down a hill, even a bunny hill. I stood there at the top with skis on my frozen feet, poles by my side, goggles strapped to my head, ready to go, and I could not move. That is a real problem if you want to learn how to ski. It was apparent to me that I did not want to ski.
After I had bought boots, gloves, ski pants, a ski jacket, a long scarf, wooly hat and for what? To learn that I did not want to ski. I also did not want to water ski. I tried it once from the lake, and when the boat took off, it pulled me forward, my skis flew off, banged up and bruised my legs, and that was the end of water-skiing.
The other problem with Ziplining is you have to wear closed-toe shoes, and I brought only sandals. On top of that, Ziplining is expensive, about $150 per person. Also, there is no way to get to the Ziplining place without renting a car or hiring a taxi, and if I climb to the top of the platform and decide I absolutely cannot go Ziplining, I still have to pay for the privilege.
Call me silly, but it just doesn’t sound like as good of an idea as it does to relax in cushy seats inside a tour van on the road to Hana and be fed breakfast and lunch. Plus, I’ll probably shoot a few excellent photos of waterfalls and Maui’s Upcountry. Hey, there is a winery tour included, too. It doesn’t get any more lazy than that. There will always be another time to explore Ziplining.
Closing an Escrow Against the Odds
I may have been riding ponies and yelling giddy-up last night but this morning my birthday is over and I’m just another old fart whose day of glory has passed. No more 20-year tawny for me today, me — who had the brilliant thought that if one glass was a fine way to end the evening, a second glass might be even more fun. Instead I have built-in radar that says, nope, you, young lady, need to go directly to bed, do not pass go, do not collect $200. Put that head on the pillow, NOW.
I am thankful for my built-in radar because it keeps me out of danger. I have pretty good gut instincts as well which I, at times, rely upon. It’s the reason we closed an escrow on Friday that probably would not have otherwise closed this month.
This was a transaction initially scheduled to close within the first week of June, not the end of June. Mid stream, the mortgage lender switched the financing from conventional to FHA because the buyer did not qualify. The underwriter discovered a foreclosure on record some 7 years past for one of the buyers and disqualified the buyer. Yup, guidelines can make provisions for waiting periods but underwriters can do what they want.
Then the file sat at the lender because everybody thought somebody else was working on it, or at least that’s the mortgage lender’s story and he was sticking to it. He went so far as to pull out the my-grandmother-died card, or wait, that might have been another transaction and these are probably guys without grandmothers, I may note. I dunno. What I did know was I had a very unhappy seller due to the financing for the buyers. She expected to close. She had to make another mortgage payment she wasn’t planning on making. She asked me for options.
The solution she liked best was to sell the home to another buyer. So that’s what we did. We signed a back-up offer with a second set of buyers and issued to the first buyer a Demand to Close escrow. The buyer’s agent was horrified. Said she had never received a Demand to Close escrow in all of her years in real estate. It won’t be the last, I offered. Not in this real estate market. The lender has the ability to make any file a priority, and it may as well be ours. They managed to pull a rabbit out of the hat and closed.
Coming Home from Key West to Sacramento
The guy in the second row on the flight from Miami to Dallas / Fort Worth looked friendly enough. He had tousled gray hair, a few wrinkles and a big grin. My husband thought it was worth a shot to ask if he would be willing to trade seats with us because American Airlines somehow messed up our seat assignments. My husband was placed in the bulkhead row. “Sorry,” the friendly guy shook his head, “I need the leg room.”
Whatever. I turned to the guy with the nearly bald head in the bulkhead and asked if he would like to switch seats. He was busy thumbing his cellphone. Bulkhead dude briefly looked up without moving his head, waved at the row across from him and played the kid card. “We’re here with our 3-year-old,” he muttered, and went back to thumbing his phone.
Because he needs to sit directly across the aisle from his wife and daughter. The same daughter who started whining and crying halfway through the flight and never once did he look up at her.
Unfortunately, our flight was delayed, almost an hour late. My husband leaned over the front seat, “Just be prepared,” he warned, “We will probably end up spending the night in Dallas,” because we had exactly 5 minutes to make our connecting flight to Sacramento.
That was not news I wanted to hear. Time to mind-bend reality. Instead, I decided to maintain a positive attitude and was determined we would meet our connecting flight if we had to run like we had just stabbed the gate attendant. Besides, the odds were our connecting flight would be delayed. I was betting on it.
And let me add here that first class on American Airlines is not like first class on other airlines. Other airlines offer its passengers a cold beverage upon boarding, a warm wet towel; the flight attendants know your name. Not American. Coach passengers are free to roam in the first-class cabin, sticking their hairy belly buttons in your face while pushing against the overhead bins as they stumble inebriated to the restrooms, but first-class passengers can’t get so much as get a set of headphones from the flight attendant because the flight attendants are too busy chatting with each other. Chaos doesn’t begin to describe it.
OK, maybe the plane was about to crash, and they were keeping this information from us, as a nicety or per flight regulations. The flight attendants could have been discussing life-saving strategies, whispering, “Let’s first save the woman with the Everglades T-shirt.”
As we were taxi-ing in Dallas, I checked my the mobile site for American and discovered our connecting flight was delayed by 30 minutes. Thank god for booking on an airline with a terrible on-time flight performance average — there is a silver lining for lousy customer service. Then, friendly guy in the second row inquired if we would make our connecting flight. Oh, yeah, now he’s all nice and sweet to us. Now that he has enjoyed his comfy seat in the second row for this entire flight.
By the time we made it to Sacramento, we discovered that American lost only one piece of our luggage and not all of it. And that’s a positive thing, too. As I learned from our trip to the Dry Tortugas, things can always get worse.
Photo: Wall at the Miami International Airport by Elizabeth Weintraub
