start

arrival

Princeville

Hanalei

Anahola

Kapa'a

Hanamaulu

Lihu'e

Koloa

helicopter ride

lu'au

fern grotto

panoramae

San Francisco (SFO) to Honolulu, Hawai'i (HNL)

Where the asides live: during this trip I'll be trying a new page-writing technique: putting asides into these little boxes instead of cluttering up the narrative's flow. If this paragraph doesn't appear in a right-aligned box then you're using a substandard web browser.

Up at 0600 - after several cycles of the snooze button - and into the shower. It's too damn early for a guy who likes "red-eye" (late night) flights. I'm having a friend chauffer me to San Francisco International Airport (SFO). I visited Kaua'i six years ago, my first time to the island. I visited Oahu a few years before that. The last time I stayed at the Kaua'i Westin (now the Marriott, I'm told) in Lihu'e. The Westin was a spectacular hotel, ostentatious, with five hot tubs arranged around a pool featuring a palm-tree covered island in the middle. This time I'm staying in Kapa'a, closer to the old coconut plantations.

About glottal stops: an ugly feature of American English is the denuding of punctuation in words. This prejudice is found most rampant in the United States Geological Survey, the folks who make our national topographic maps. Perhaps the most famous adulturation of a place-name is Pike's Peak, which the USGS demands be known as "Pikes Peak". The same abuse happens in acquired foreign words, such as "naïve" and "façade"; we remove the umlaut over the 'i' (as we do from all instances of two vowels next to each other) and replace the cedilla with the letter 'c'. It's a sign of a mindful author and a careful publisher when you see proper punctuation in words. How did I get from speaking about Kaua'i to forcibly removed punctuation? Well, a single quote mark is used to show glottal stops, the pause in the middle of a word, typically between vowels. Hawai'i is pronounced "ha vah eee" (note both the pause and the 'vee' sound. Remove the glottal stop and you have haoli  (white tourist folks) mispronouncing the name of the island chain as "ha wah yee". The town of Kapa'a is pronounced by the locals as "ka pah ah", not "ka pah".

For each trip I've rented a car. It's faster and more versatile than the bus. If you want to see the entire island, a car is the only way to go. Last time I had a convertible; this time the tour package was a bit less generous. If memory serves, last time my bus-using tourist friends spent much of their time waiting on the mass transit system. I'm not on the island long enough to squander our time.

"Lunch" having been served and the remains taken away, the film begins: Geena Davis, Matthew Modine, and Frank Langella in Cutthroat Island. Not enough time was left after the feeding frenzy and so the aisles are full of would-be bathroom users, making it difficult to see an already confusing film (mostly due to the bizarre airline film editing). I have this strange vision of one of the flight crew running down to the video store on the way to the airport. Such is life on a charter airline (or so I imagine).

The guy across the aisle buys me a rum in thanks for stowing his oversized bag into the overhead storage bins (don't get me started...) and for rescuing his portable cassette player when he dumped his sweet soda all over himself. So I'm enjoying a rum-and-coffee, light on the rum. By now I've set back my wristwatch to Kaua'i time so that I get used to it during the flight. Two fighter planes returning to Hickam Air Force Base - adjacent to HNL - are low on fuel, so we're asked to fly in a holding pattern until they can land. As a result we're also directed to the outermost runway, which results in a long taxi to the terminal but a beautiful ocean and golf course view on the way in. Before arriving at the gate we pass a B-2 "Stealth" fighter-bomber parked on the tarmac.

Honolulu, Hawai'i (HNL) to Lihu'e, Kaua'i, Hawai'i (LIH)

The delay in leaving SFO combined with unexpected turbulance and our yielding the landing priority to the fighter craft, our scheduled two-hour layover is reduced to about fifteen minutes. I deplane, take a Wiki-wiki bus to the departure terminal, and immediately walk to the gate, passing such airport delicacies as Yummy Korean B.B.Q. (I seem to recall there being a rather good sushiya somewhere at HNL; perhaps back out in the public area, which I bypass on my inter-gate sprint.)

The pictures you see here: instead of using my trusty Apple Apple QuickTake 100 100 camera of years past, on this trip I'll be using a Kodak DC-120 digital camera which I bought yesterday (!), complete with 3x zoom and PCMCIA "flash card" storage. Late last night Kevin brought back the damaged IBM ThinkPad (more on that later) and I pulled the 12 MB RAMcard in hopes that it was a PCMCIA ATA-compliant device so that it would fit into the camera and provide me with room for 12 times the storage capacity. No such luck.

The island-hopping trip takes less than one hour, and consists in little more than a rapid succession of (a) safety orientation, (b) take-off, (c) delivery of beverage, (d) pickup of beverage containers, (e) landing. There's barely any level flight. And with that we're at Lihu'e Airport, Kaua'i, Hawai'i. Upon exiting the plane I'm greeted with a fragrant breeze, the odor of gardenia and other flowering lovelies. A relaxing entré to the Garden Isle.

In lieu of waiting for the bags to arrive (they were put on a later plane due to the shortened layover) I take the shuttle bus to the Avis lot and pick up the rental car. I'm back at the baggage claim carousel a few minutes before the luggage is.

From the airport it's a short ten-minute drive to Kapa'a, and I check into the Kaua'i Sands (the only Hawai'ian-owned hotel on the island).