Aloha Honolulu

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Our final full day in Honolulu began when my phone rang from a North Carolina number. I’ve been getting many, many calls over the past two years from company’s wishing to offer me extended warranty coverage on my 2010 Prius. It might not have been so bad if it was 7AM in the morning in Nevada; but, at 5AM in the morning in Honolulu on vacation it was more than annoying, especially when half the time there is nobody on the other end of the call. I’ve found that when they ask how much mileage is on the car, and I say just over 250,000 miles that usually puts a quick end to the call. One persistent salesperson who’d obviously just completed a course on how not to take NO for an answer tried to switch me over her manager, whom she assured me could probably do something for me. One sales guy, who was probably the only one who actually had a brain, thought about my answer, and said, “Naw, you can’t have that many miles on your car.” As if he’s going to argue with me about how many miles are on MY car. I just didn’t tell him how many fewer miles under one-quarter million were on my car. Anyway, this was one of the annoying one where nobody was on the other end. So, that’s how my day started, and now I had Wyndham Timeshare Owner’s Update Meeting to look forward to. For those of you not familiar with Wyndham, make no mistake, this is nothing but a sales meeting in which they try to convince people who already have more time share weeks than they know what to do with to buy even more. There was a time these could be extremely high-pressure sales meetings; but, we’ve encountered both ends of the spectrum. Here in Honolulu they were trying a new twist, urging people to buy into the Honolulu timeshare; but, not to use the timeshare. A novel idea. Instead of using your one week in Honolulu, the program offers you two weeks at other Wyndham resorts (including other Hawaiian Islands). I’m looking at Sharon, “We have enough trouble, we don’t need to pay money to make the problem of using our time share credits worse, and adding one additional week would be bad, but adding two weeks would be even worse. I think the salesperson knew we weren’t hot prospects for him, and he took our first no; although, his manager came over and tried to sweeten the pot. We took the $75 gift Amex Card they offered us as an incentive to come to the meeting, and we hope to have a nice dinner on Maui later in our vacation.

We decided to head over to the rental car place and turn our car in one day early. From our arrival there, they did not instill in us a great deal of confidence in their ability to check the car in quickly and get us to the airport early in the morning. When we arrived three groups were waiting with a ton of luggage for the shuttle, and had been waiting for nearly one hour. One lady said with a somewhat worried hesitancy, “We allocated a whole hour to check the car in, and we still need to get to the airport.” Interestingly, the checking the car went quite easily; almost, too easily. A guy took the keys, asked if we’d gotten gas, and was happy when I told him the tank was full. In retrospect, I hope the guy worked at the Economy Rental Car, because he said, “Okay, that’s all you need. The car’s checked in.” There was no bar code reader checking the car in, he just pulled the car forward, and did proceed to get cars for people who were picking up their rentals. So I’m pretty sure I should be okay on that score. If he’d driven it off the lot, then I might be worried. Two groups piled into the van that did show up, large enough to carry 11 passengers. But there wasn’t room for the luggage of the third group of two people, so we got their seats because we had no luggage with us. The other couple was assured another van would be along in five minutes.

We purchased round trip shuttle tickets from the airport to our Waikiki resort, and what that cost was almost covered by what we’ll save by not paying for the final day of parking at the timeshare.

We walked to the Cheeseburger Place that Sharon had seen down the street from Tony Roma’s, and had lunch there. The burgers were giant and delicious, and I also enjoyed their seasoned fries. I was tempted by their cocktail concoctions; but, stuck with iced tea. After the burger, did I mention they were large burgers, I told Sharon, “I don’t know if I need anything to eat tonight.” We’d been planning to go out somewhere nice in Waikiki. She had half a burger left which she took home in a doggy bag, and agreed, she didn’t need a big meal tonight either. We’ll always have Maui.



The remainder of our day was spent getting ready for our travel day tomorrow, doing laundry and such.

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