The Cost of Heaven

So there are a couple of downsides to living in Maui. Don’t get me wrong – for the most part this is the coolest place in the world (having been to at least 4 other places in the world you can trust me when I say that). I figure my blog posts from here on out will be all about how cool this place is, so that’s one reason why I’m doing this.

Number one – the sugar cane factory stink. Holy crap. There’s a big HC&S factory along one of the highways here and most of the time the stink is pouring out of it. It’s a stench that’s impossible to describe. The closest I can come is that it smells like someone ate a pound of sugar and then threw it up. It’s a sweet smell, but at the same time it makes everyone who smells it queesy. Truly something that needs to be experienced to understand. When I first got here I lost a lot of weight. I thought it was all my diet and exercise paying off, but looking back it was probably loss of appetite due to passing the cane factory going to and from work every day. Ick.

Number two is obviously the cost of living here. We knew it would be expensive, but we had no idea. Rent is expensive. Electricity is expensive. Cars are expensive. Food is expensive. But we’ve learned to manage. We found a nice little cottage and we each pitch in $400 a month. A friend from Utah will be moving in for a few months in the fall and so it’ll go down to $300 a month. But we’re lucky. Most people move here on their own and have to get a studio for $700-$800 on average. I’ve put in fluorescent lightbulbs in our place and we’ve put off using our air conditioner until things get unbearably hot in the summer. We take lukewarm showers (and it feels good), and it all adds up to a perfectly reasonable electric bill. We’ve learned to go to Costco and Walmart for most things including food and we don’t buy anything at Safeway unless it’s on sale. I’m a little dude and don’t have a huge caloric intake need to start out with, so it’s not a big problem for me, but Steve has struggled – he likes his food. So first moving in was a huge outlay, but now our expenses have leveled off and I’m feelin good about living here.

After living here a while it seems that Maui puts everyone through a trial by fire when they first get here (thank goodness we weren’t the only ones). It seems lots of people move here on a whim and get beaten down till there’s nothing left. It’s really very humbling. Maybe that’s why everyone is so nice here – there’s an understanding that we’re all struggling and a need to stick together to make it here. We’ve all been through the war and we all have that one thing in common at least. Anyway, more on that later.

Ah,

so my first big post about Hawaii. Where to begin? A lot has happened these last couple months, so I’ll have to do this in installments.

As they say, I guess the best place to start is at the beginning. So in December Christin (my sister) and Steve (her husband) and I packed up and began preparations for Hawaii. I still have payments to pay on my Elantra, so my parents and I worked out a deal. I would bring my mom’s Suzuki Sidekick over to Hawaii and my parents would make the payments on my car while my mom drove it around. It seemed like a good idea at the time – I would have an extra $230 in my pocket every month, my mom would have a newish car to drive, and we would have a nice little 4x4 to drive around with. When we were done here we’d sell the Suzuki and give the proceeds to my parents – eliminating the hassle of shipping it back to the mainland. While some things have happened in the meantime to make us rethink this decision, I guess the bottom line is that it’s still cool to have the 4-wheel-drive, and I can always have someone ship over the Elantra if I decide to stay here. More on this later.

So we drove the Suzuki to California a few days before our plane left so we could get it on the boat and on its journey to the island. It normally takes 2-3 weeks for a car to get shipped over, and we wanted to limit the cost of renting a car on Maui before our car arrived.

Steve has a brother in California about 30 minutes from the harbor and LAX, so it all worked out nicely. There really wasn’t a lot to do in Cali, especially because we really didn’t have a car. We played a lot of XBOX, read our Maui books and tried to think through what we would do once we were over here.

I put most of my sound system stuff in my check-in bags so I wouldn’t have to pay to ship them fedex or whatever. The weight limit on check-ins is 50 pounds, and I managed to pack both bags so they were 49 pounds each. The good thing about moving to Hawaii is that you really don’t need a lot of clothes, so there really wasn’t anything else to bring besides the big stuff.

So we got on the plane without a hitch. The plane ride over here was friggin long (as everyone knows). We were on a later flight and arrived in Honolulu even later. Then we had about a 7 hour layover until the flight to Maui took off at about 5:30am. Talk about so close yet so far away. So we bunkered down at the airport and tried to get as much sleep as possible before departure. Inter-island flights are funny. You’re in the air a total of about 25 minutes – about 5 or 10 minutes into the flight the pilot announces your decent.

Talk about relief when we touched down in Maui.

So here's us at the airport trying to catch some shuteye:


And here's us at the campsite where we were prepared to spend up to 2 weeks, if necessary:

Bleh

Well, I'm feeling too lazy to post anything worthwhile tonight. Maybe tomorrow. In the meantime, here's a song I heard when I went to last year's Warren Miller film and I've since added it to my list of "songs i'm obsessed with". That and everyone else seems to be posting music on their blogs so I thought I'd join in.

Back from a long absence

A typical morning at the beach with fresh pineapple for a snack. Just a quick note to say we're finally getting internet at the house next week sometime. Hopefully that means I'll be better able to keep in touch with email, blog, webcab, whatever. Aloha!