Blogging on Island Time

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Should have been obvious, but I just figured out that the thing that saps the will to blog, for me, isn't the vacation itself—after all, the sun sets at 18:30 here, and on our side of Oʻahu they roll up the sidewalks by 19:00, which leaves plenty of leisurely evening non-beach time perfect for blogging—no, sadly, it's Facebook and Foursquare and high mobile data availability. By the time I sit down at home (== the beach house), I feel like I've told the interesting parts of the story already, in couple-hundred-character increments and checkins and phone-camera tagged uploads. I don't really painstakingly maintain my Flickr feed, either: I definitely upload, but I don't spend extra time labeling each photo to tell its story.

It's a little microcosm of the debate about crowdsourced news via social media (e.g., Twitter) vs. professional journalism, except for the fact that I don't blog as well as a good journalist reports and travel blogs aren't as important as reporting on world events. Also unlike journalism, my travel blog isn't completely dead yet.

Tuesday! On Tuesday our primary mission was to locate a calm beach where all of us swimmers of all skill levels could enjoy ourselves in the water without fighting even those little breaky waves. For this, we made our way to Lanikai Beach, just up the road in Kailua. According to Wikipedia it's considered one of the top beaches in the world, and we're staying about 10 minutes from it! Just before we left for Hawaiʻi, Anne & I caught a rerun of the Travel Channel's Top 10 Hawaiʻian Beaches, in which Lanikai unsurprisingly ranks #1. In the TV special, however, after spending the rest of the episode talking about beaches, when the Travel Channel reaches Lanikai you won't learn anything about the sand, the surf, or the views because they spend the entire segment doing close-ups of the barely-covered very-artificial breasts of two models they've brought out to the beach to do a photo shoot for the ABC Stores' swimsuit calendar. They spend more time interviewing the creeper photographer (who assures us that Lanikai Beach is the best beach because it makes the models so happy and they give better photos) than they do showing anything about the beach. I'm pretty sure travelers are not actually the target audience for this program.

But I digress.

We found Lanikai Beach to be utterly delightful and, on this off-season weekday morning, only sparsely populated, with scatterings of families enjoying the silky sand and gentle water. Small tour groups in street clothes occasionally filed onto the beach, presumably for photos of the spectacular views (not of models). We could see lines of kayakers from Kailua braving the offshore surf line to get to the super-natural little islands beyond. What seemed like a mix of locals and tourists frolicked in the aquamarine waters. Stand-up paddlers glided past. An old dude waded nearly up to his shoulders wearing a floppy hat and huge headphones: metal detecting? I think there's a bit of surfing at Kailua, further north, but where we were didn't offer enough wave action. I'm a terrible swimmer, so it was wonderful having a beach where I could really go all-in and bob around in the waves and have a great, wet, low-stress time. Waimānalo is gorgeous, but a little rougher, so it demands more of my attention and isn't as relaxing.

The fact that I only took three photos the entire day tells its own story, I think. Spent most of the time in water!

We didn't get tired of Lanikai, but we did get hungry, so we packed up and carefully considered our dining options in Kailua town. After three days of three plate lunches—"plate lunch", a Hawaiʻian staple, is simply meat such as teriyaki chicken or kalua pork served on a plate with rice and/or mac salad—we were determined to try something different, but none of us could remember the name of the Chinese place our rental house's proprietors recommended, so we decided to keep things simple and went to a hometown favorite, Round Table Pizza. The RTP in Kailua is a delightful local slightly dive-y institution, and we gave it a local flavor by ordering the classic Maui Zaui (Canadian bacon, pineapple, pepperoni, green onions and tomatoes over a sweet teriyaki sauce) and a local franchise special, Kalua Pork Supreme with barbecue pulled pork and Hawaiʻian BBQ sauce drizzle. We had fun and embarrassed the girls by playing and singing along to Rock Band classics on the digital jukebox.

RTP Kailua is right next to the Keolu Drive Safeway, referred to by one Foursquare commenter as the "ghetto" Safeway since there's a "nicer" one nearby. It's a typical old-skool Safeway and we're perfectly happy with it. This got me thinking that perhaps the reason we feel so at home in Waimānalo and Kailua town is that they're a little downscale, or as Barb aptly put it, they're "the Burien of Oʻahu"! There's a low-income subsidized housing village in Waimānalo, and on the way from Kailua there's a juvenile detention facility set back from the road with easy-to-overlook razor-wire-topped fences. I'm used to living in the kinds of neighborhoods where NIMBY stuff ends up IMBY, so it just feels even more like home.

At Safeway we acquired a package of steaks, some marinade, a box of instant mashed potatoes, and both of the Maui Gold pineapples they had for sale, and took them back home for later grilled supper. The kids ("kids" is almost always inclusive of Joe, which in my book is a good thing) spent more time on the beach. Upon arriving home, we started discovering how much we all sunburned at Lanikai in just a couple hours, in spite of considerable and timely sunscreen application. I myself did fine, perhaps because I spent most of my time underwater? But Greg and Joe were starting to lobster up. In 2006, Barb had discovered a magical Hawaiʻian aftersun elixir made with kukui nut oil that worked better on sunburn than aloe gel and felt better, too, and she'd originally acquired it at the Naturally Hawaiʻian gift shop right here in Waimānalo, so we hopped in the rental van hoping for a quick trip to pick up more—but they didn't have any and couldn't even remember what the stuff was. We decided to try Waimānalo Town Center, a tiny tourist trap just down the road where giant buses stop to encourage their passengers to shop for ʻukuleles and coral. At the crackseed store, we found a nice selection of products by Oils of Aloha which weren't exactly the same magic elixir but were made by the same company with very similar ingredients and definitely delivered more comfort for our lobstermen when we got home.

Steaks were delicious, we saved the pineapples for later, and 1,204 words isn't bad for the lost art of travel blogging, is it?

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Photos

Uses for sand
You can plant children in it.

Comments

[Mom & John]

Happy Birthday Laura! What kind of a celebration did they give you this time? That special cake we had in 2006 was delicious! Would trade the cloudy rainy day here for the beach swim! Sounds like a great time, but not the lobster sunburn. Need a postcard from you!