Portland to Poipu
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It was an easy flight from Portland to Honolulu. No screaming children but lots of very large Hawaiian football players coming back from a camp at the University of Oregon. Some of these guys were seriously big. There were two guys who were about 5 ft square with necks bigger than my thighs what there was of a neck. One guy will be playing in the NFL for sure. Six-five or so probably 280. Built like Lawrence Taylor. The whole team was busy trying to look very cool.
Our concern of course was that one of the extra large ones would be sitting next to us. One did sit next to Marion but he was more human-sized. He had made what I consider a bold fashion choice with his sunglasses. Thick white plastic with a rhinestone design in the arm pieces. And a big white matching plastic watch also with rhinestones. You might say they were designed for women but only if you were suicidal. Actually you might still find them a bit much even if a woman was wearing them. But *you* tell him that.
There were lots of ‘big’ people at the Honolulu airport too but not big in quite the same way. It was definitely noticeable the number of people who you would consider substantial. But not ‘fat’ in that bulging stomach sort of way us white guys get. Just big. We hung around a bit listening to incessant announcements from Hawaiian Air about this plane loading, agricultural inspections, and what not. All followed by ‘Mahalo’. The Hawaiian word for thank you. But it was spoken with a very hard emphasis on the 2nd syllable and it sounded to our ears (and others) like it translated more to “die you lousy mainlanders”.
The flight to Kauai was a brief 35 minutes or so. We picked up our rental car which turned out to be a free upgrade because they were out of compact cars. A dark blue Chevy Cobalt. If you’re familiar with the Cobalt, you know it is not a particularly large car. Wonder what the compact would have been?
We headed south to our place in Poipu. It was a very pretty drive from Lihue. It was late afternoon and as we would discover, the light is very warm and golden that time of day (and much of the day) on Kauai. There were Jurassic Park looking hills lit up in the late afternoon sun. We would pass these hills many times during the trip and each time they were just as pretty and awe-inspiring as the first time. I kept wanting to stop for pictures but after all, we just got there.
The turn to Poipu heads down a tree tunnel which turns out to be famous enough to appear in the postcards at the gift stores. It was planted 150 years ago by an early island settler. Quite nice and reminded me of a similar drive on Kangaroo Island in Australia. We already were seeing lots of chickens which I’ll explain later.
The place is surprisingly large. From the parking lot it didn’t look like it would have a view of the water which bummed me out briefly, but it did, and a very nice one at that. We could look out across the pool to the ocean. The planting is really pretty too and at just the right level to block the road so all you see are the palm trees and the ocean.
I did a quick explore-walk to Poipu Beach which is a 3 or 4 minute walk down the road to the left. I ran into lots of swarms of gnats, which was worrisome, and they tended to stick to the generous quantities of sun screen I had on. But as it turns out that was the only time I ran into them or really any bugs, except for some quite large bees we saw later. Lots of swarms of tourists at the Sheraton though, which faces the beach. But a nice beach. Lots of folks in the water.
I saw some surfers in the bay between the beach and our place. Pretty good ones. It was mostly girls as it turned out. It was a semi-decent sunset but off to the far right and somewhat behind us so not really a good place to capture it.
There’s a 3 hr time difference here (earlier). So we fell asleep at 8:30. This ended up serving us pretty well in that we’d get up early with the sun at 6-ish, do some stuff before the tourists got going and the sun got too hot, and then went to sleep shortly after sunset. Over the course of the week I ended up staying up later and later and ultimately made it to 10:30. But Marion pretty much stuck to Portland time. Which is better for her. I’ll be sleepy at work on Tuesday.
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