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: