We knew going in that this wasn't going to be like our typical vacations. I often joke that I make Brent take forced march vacations. I want to cram in as many cool, fun, things as I can. We go on hikes, we go on tours, we go on excursions. We have plans for specific restaurants. We have days devoted to trying out the snorkeling on a different beach.
Spreadsheets are often involved.
But this time we were doing it differently. I talked before that Brent was uncomfortable with me ocean boarding a boat. He had panicked visions of a wave hitting while I was holding on to the ladder and me yanking my elbow out of socket and starting all over again, though without the procedure as a "this will work" carrot to dangle. Because I still have pronounced weakness in my arm some of the hikes were out of the question too.
I know, you are like, what? Do you walk on your hands?
Well no, but on more than a few that we've done there have been places where you are basically pulling yourself up with a rope and scaling the edge as much as "hiking" to get into certain areas. More arm than you'd think, and definitely more leg strength than a lot of people were prepared for; it took a village on one memorable waterfall hike to get one of our tour group up and out of a space.
So the plan was to be a lot less physical. Snorkel off of the beach at the resort, and honestly the beach off of our resort is a common drop zone for tour boats anyway, the snorkeling is excellent there. Add in a few whale watch tours and mostly sit on the beach or by the pool. Not a lot scheduled, just down time.
Though one of the crew members on our Sunset Dinner cruise Monday asked what else we had planned for the week and when I listed it off he was like, "That's a lot." Umm...no. Not really. Not for us.
Here was the itinerary:
Sunday: Fly in. Food cart lunch by the airport. Pool time. USWNT game. Dinner either at the resort or walk up to Monkeypod. (Originally the thought had been to do the luau at the resort on Sunday night, we like to do a luau or a sunset cruise the first night in Hawaii to sort of ease in to the week. I checked the schedule for the luau then looked at some other things, then went back to book the luau and it was full. So weird, I thought, that never happens I thought, on a SUNDAY? Never hearing the clanging bells of foreshadowing. So when the luau was booked I scheduled a sunset cruise. Then the USWNT won their game and ended up playing for the championship in the Concacaf W tournament so that got moved to Monday night)
Monday: Originally nothing scheduled, then the sunset dinner cruise was slotted in. But all day free to lounge by the pool or swim off the beach
Tuesday: Kihei Caffe for breakfast, whale watch trip in the early afternoon. Dinner at Morimoto's. The rest of the day free
Wednesday: Trip to Lanai. This is a full day excursion. Some sailing, then time on Lanai for snorkeling or a hike, BBQ lunch on Lanai, some more sailing, back in port by 6 PM.
Thursday: Free day plan to lounge and swim, dinner at Monkeypod for pie on Pi Day.
Friday: Completely free day, lounge, swim, nothing planned
Saturday: Thorns opening match 7 AM, Whale watch tour 10, free afternoon, luau starts at 5. (this was the busiest day as far as things that were set times)
Sunday: Flight leaves at 3 so morning at the resort, grab lunch on the way to the airport.
Really casual. Lots of downtime and swimming and relaxing. Full days with nothing to do but sit in a lounge chair under an umbrella dipping in and out of the pool or ocean. *sigh*
So what happened in actuality?
Sunday, the flight was really early so we did stop by the food carts but only one was open, we were on Portland time in our heads so went ahead and grabbed some lunch from that cart. It was a Thai fusion place and it was...okay...hard to impress a Portlander with Thai fusion. We have some of the best Thai (imo) here. Then got to the resort and holy.cow. We have never seen the check in so busy. We waiting in line to drop off our car, we waited in line to check in at the front desk. The valet said they had 500 check-ins for Sunday. Five. Hundred. And as I stood in line I realized that absolutely everyone ahead of me knew each other. And people who had either come in the day before or earlier that day kept stopping to talk to all of them.
It was like a horror movie realization as I turned and surveyed the open air lobby floor...so many people carrying tote bags with the same logo on them. Oh no...we were in the middle of a convention. When Brent made it back from getting the car taken care of I told now I knew why the luau was sold out on a Sunday.
Good news for us, because we were early our room wasn't ready but they could upgrade us to the fancy pants level. The one behind the gates. The one with the private lounge area with light breakfast in the morning, snacks in the afternoon and drinks, appetizers and dessert every night. Ooh. Ahh. All that and an ocean view. All for the special low low price of...oh no thank you, we'll just wait. So we waited.
And they upgraded us to the special fancy pants level for free. Nice.
And it was a gorgeous room. A touch bigger than the one we normally get. Almost the same ocean view as we had two years ago. We were a couple floors higher and one row back then. And on the other side of the golden gates. The wind was crazy on Sunday and the check in was so delayed that instead of heading down to the pool or the beach we just hung out on our lanai and watched the soccer match and the whales (I brought my binoculars so it was great viewing!) After the match we decided to take a walk down to the water and then grab some dinner. When we went by the pools we were shocked at how packed they were. Like wall to wall people. Holy cow. I mentioned the weather right? It was crazy windy. But every space was full of people. Those 500 check ins...
We grabbed dinner at the sushi bar then headed up to our room for a quiet night in trying to convince our bodies that it wasn't really three hours later than the clock was telling us it was. And trying not to do to the we got up at 1:30 AM Hawaii time math. Giving up we headed to bed early.
But it was not to be. The Botero, lovely open air bar that sits on the ground floor with all of the fancy pants rooms in the Napua tower circling it, well normally they play live music until 9 and then close down completely at 10. The conventioneers, the badge people, they were having none of that and we were awake listening to their very loud group until 1 am. ONE A.M.
Okay, so Sunday did not get off to the start we wanted, but sitting on our lanai watching whales and an outstanding USWNT game was great. So the badge people were a little loud, not a big deal, it was their first night and I'm sure they were excited to see each other. We can sleep in on Monday and then spend the day relaxing and...
Every single chair by the pool was claimed before we were done with breakfast on Monday. The cabanas were all rented out for the day. The beach was already 5 rows deep with chairs and umbrella. Holy. cow. So we took a walk along the beach path (there is a gorgeous three mile path that the resort happens to sit in the middle of, go one way it's higher cliffs and ocean views, go the other way and it's closer to the water and some fun tide pools.) and talked about hitting the water and just not sitting out on the beach. We walked down to the beach on the way back in and...okay so the surf was really churning. The storms that had caused the winds and was still creating a bit of wind, were further offshore but really thrashing the water. Not great conditions for snorkeling. It's okay, we will relax on the lanai and watch whales and read. It's not poolside, but the pools were packed so that would have been annoying anyway...
You can already see how the week went.
The storms were persistent all but one day, and that day we went into Kihei for breakfast so didn't hit the water first thing, we thought we'd go when we got back and by the time we were ready it was churned up again. The pools were crazy packed, we could have rushed down to reserve a chair at 7 but there was no room in the water to do anything except stand, and as you know, crowds aren't my thing and they aren't Brent's either. The bar was kept open late every night. I often wondered how people felt who were trying to enjoy a vacation when one of the groups I was there as a badger descended on them. Now I know. They wished we would just go away.
So instead of swimming and snorkeling and lounging on the beach or by the pool, we walked along the beach path, we wandered around the shops, we sat on our private lanai or in the private lounge areas behind the golden gates and relaxed. We did all we could to avoid the crowds at the resort, and marveled at how empty everything else still is. Covid hit hard for tourism and then the fires really shut down another piece. We did not drive up to Lahaina and look at the damage, we didn't go further than Kihei. Sure we were curious as to the damage but it just felt so disrespectful to go look.
Sure, we lost a lot of our favorite places to go on vacation, but the people that lived there lost everything. We will go back when they are ready for visitors but not before.
Okay, so this is really long, I'll write more about what I was hoping to get out of it and what I got out of it tomorrow.
It was a long vacation, fitting that I get a lot of long blogs out of it, right?
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