The Road to Hāna 3
The following is continued from last week. This week's installment and last week's are both unlike the week before, however, which was a not altogether successful attempt at a travel guide, for some reason or another, which now fully escapes the recollection of most everyone at the office as to why we decided to go in that original direction in the first place.
Who knows?
This week, with a lot less ado than last week, we bring The Road to Hāna. Again.
So these pools. I don't want to put the travel guides solely on the hook, here, for the impressions that limpid pools and verdant streams lurk around every corner. Possibly one of the most enduring images of Hawai'i I had before actually traveling to Hawai'i was the one where the boarding gate of an airline extends out over a pool and a couple come hurtling out of the gate and into the pool below. If you pressed me for the one reason why I wanted to go to Hawai'i, I probably would have said that was it. I also probably would have been lying, but if you're the pushy sort of person to go around demanding reasons from people why they travel to a place then I'm usually inclined to just make something up and try and get you to go away.
We consulted our handy guide, which told us to avoid the first few such pools and stopping points, as everyone was fooled into stopping at these attractions and we would be rewarded if we just pressed a little further on. And so we did.
To pass the time, along with counting mile markers, myself and my guide from Clare, it turned out, were both practicing our pronunciation of Haleakala, the volcano looming off to our right, as we drove along. And we were both doing it without the other's knowledge.
It wasn't that the Monte Carlo was that big (I know I made a point of comparing it to a 747, but let's be serious here for a minute) that we were able to retreat to our own corners of the car, out of sight and earshot of the other. We were just both, it turns out, repeating Haleakala (Ha-lay-AH Ka-la, make sure you split it up between the 'e' and the 'a' to make it easier on yourself) in our own head to pass the time.
The reason this became known to each other in the course of the search for the pools follows:
"What... hey, what are you saying?" asked the girl/guide from Clare, still looking slightly green around the gills. Before I get all sorts of hate mail from people in Ireland screaming "Our girls don't have gills! That's ridiculous! And sexist! And racist! Burn him!" She didn't have actual gills. They were more like developing gills which would, some day, enable her to live on either land or under water. Like a just in case sort of thing. Now, I had known she was resourceful before the trip to Hawai'i, but it was the development of mini-gills that really impressed me.
"Nothing," I said back.
"Your lips were moving, though."
"They weren't." I made sure my lips weren't moving any more. I twitched them a little bit, once I knew that had stopped moving, just to show that maybe it was that, my involuntary voluntary twitching that she had seen and mistaken for me moving my lips.
She shifted in her seat to face me and my accused lips. The Monte Carlo actually was quite big, I thought, as she had plenty of room to get an appropriate perspective on the lower half of my face and could zoom in for a fair distance, if she needed. "I think they were. What were you saying?"
And then, before I could reply, she hit me with it. I don't have a defense against this one. I don't know any man that does. In rapid succession, she spun out the following: "I'm kind of hungry. But also feeling sick, still. Ohh... don't take this corner too fast. Look! Palm trees! Like with the dinosaurs! Want any trail mix? Water? Do you have to pee? I think I have to pee. I'm not sure... Hmm. I like that orange. And red. On the trees."
"Haleakala," I said.
"No way!" she said, stopping the torrent. "I was trying to say that, too! Ha-LAY-ah KA-la. Ha!"
So then we were trying to say Haleakala out loud to pass the time.
And still no sign of the pools. Yet. Not even the popular ones.
To be continued...?
Summary
disclaimer:
There you have it, more fun and adventure in Maui.
This week, in honor of St. Valentine and all that craic, we have a follow up to a feature we originally did sometime in either 1999 or 1998, a time in which we didn't even think they had computers. But hey ho, I guess they did, because a little tidbit called Horoscope Tips, advice on hooking up with the sign of your choosing debuted, to vast acclaim. And now it's back, in the form of this week's horoscopes. Get thee out and woo!
Discuss this in the forums
Discuss the horoscopes in the forums
Forum hosting provided by forumthing.