Blogs from Waimanalo, Oahu, Hawaii, United States, North America

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 ... read more

We had decided that today was to be a planning day, even though we had planned for yesterday to be a planning half-day. However, the flight and subsequent drive to Waimanalo left us all tired and ready to drink mai tais and sleep. I woke up with the sunrise and headed to the beach for some photography. Everybody else followed along eventually and I got some cool pictures. So, we goofed off at the beach for a while, did some planning, and then headed to Honolulu for Hilo Hattie and shopping for tourist crap. Then we came back to the house, made some grilled spam burgers and weird pink Hawai'ian hot dogs. And we drank more mai tais.... read more

Well, the flight was long, and since I did not pay $5 to rent the headphones to watch Green Lantern, pretty boring, except for the turbulence, which was not boring, and kept us in our seats for most of the flight. This was fine with me, as I had intended to be in my seat for the entirety of the flight. Interestingly enough, I got stuck in the rear galley hanging on to a stanchion for 10 or 15 minutes while I waited for the beverage cart to clear the aisle. We had what seemed like about a 5-mile hike from our jetway to the baggage claim, but on the bright side, we got to see all the sights at Honolulu airport. We scored a tricked-out Chrysler Town-and-Country minivan from the rental place and were on ... read more

January 24th was a big day in history, it is the day of my birth. I decided to do something big this year. On Wednesday January 20th I completed all requirements to be certified as a private pilot, single engine land. Today I rented a plane on Oahu and Kim and I flew around the island. The day started out a little more leisurely than the our previous days, we slept in until about 8 am. I had a bit of flight planning to do so I to started that while enjoying a cup of tea and listing to the ocean through the open windows and sliding door. The plane was scheduled for 11:00 am so we took off for Honolulu airport about 10:15. Once there we finished all of the necessary paperwork and headed out ... read more

Day three started out the same as day two, we woke up early to watch the sunrise from the beach; Kim ran a bit while I sat and enjoyed a cup of tea. Kim has been working on getting scuba certified and this will be her first open water dive. We dove with Aaron’s dive shop out of Kailua. (Things are going well with them so far, I’ll fill in more after our second set of dives on Tuesday.) We checked in early for the dive, filled out the proper paper work and then hopped in the van with Mel and Jeff to catch the boat, Nacho, to our dive location. The swells were pretty big for our dive and we were expecting pretty crappy visibility, I was going to be diving with three divers who ... read more