Hawaii

                                                                            Hawaii

We are on our way to Hawaii. I must admit, it is not my planning that is getting me to the island of paradise.  I told Rene if she wanted to go to plan it and I’d tag along.

 There is no easy way to get from Alaska to anywhere, let alone half a world away to some place sunny.

 We Leave Sitka at six in the morning,  take a quick flight to Juneau, change planes and head to Ketchikan. After a short stop without leaving the plane, we head to Seattle.  Another plane change and we are off to Sacramento. A short stop there and we are finally on our way to paradise.
Five and a half hours later we are at last seeing the lights of Maui. As the big plane drifts down for a landing we are seeing a sight that makes Alaska island dweller’s hearts skip beats. There is solid traffic bumper to bumper as far as we can see.
 Now, coming from a town of 8,500 people the last thing we need is to try and navigate through bumper to bumper traffic for nearly an hour to get to our condo for the night.
 Rene grew up around big cities so when the traffic gets stuffy, I leave the driving up to her.
 “Looks like you’ll have to take this one tonight,” I comment to her still peering out the plane window.
 It is 8:30 p.m. when the big bird touches down on the hot Maui runway. Well, hot to us, not to the locals.
 We leave the plane and stroll into the airport to find people racing to get luggage and get out the doors. Not to uncommon in airports and probably everyone in a hurry to get into their shorts and tee shirts to keep from melting in the sweltering heat.
 Rene’s phone cheeps that a text came in. She stops in her tracks. “Tsunami” is the only word written. It is from our daughter Brooke, who is in Sitka holding down the fort as we play.
 We get to the car rental window to find a cardboard sign hurriedly written telling all to go take the shuttle to the lot for car rentals tonight.
Now we are starting to hear the word. Tsunami is coming for Hawaii! It is now nine at night and it is supposed to hit the island at ten thirty! Everyone is racing to get out of the airport, especially the employees, and to get to high ground. The airport is just about at sea level and expected to take a good drubbing if the wave reaches here.
 Rene is in touch with Brooke who is informing us that a quake in British Columbia might have caused a tsunami that is supposed to reach Alaska and then Hawaii. Brook then informed us that the wave did not hit Sitka even though they were under the Tsunami  warning there as well. That was good news. Our little condo up there sits on ocean front and will be one of the first to go if a good wave washes that place.
 We get to the car rental yard and people are racing around everywhere. We check in to get our little compact car. When we go to pick it out the help in the parking yard are shouting, “Just pick a rig, any one you want! If the tsunami does hit all these cars will be destroyed.  No extra charge, just pick one and get to high ground!”
 We are in a row of small SUV’s so we just race to a gray one and jump in. On the way out the girl scans the car and hands us the paper work.
 “Where do we go?” we asked her. “This is our first time on the island.”
 The girl rushed into a route we should take to get to some highway to get us out of town and towards a mountain.
 “You’d best be getting out of here as they are going to close all the lower roads and highways in one hour,” she admonishes as she races away to save herself.
 Pitch black darkness, in some strange rental car, in a place we have never seen, no maps, no g.p.s. this is a great start to a week’s vacation.
At last Rene finds her way out of the airport and into the bumper to bumper traffic heading somewhere. I am giving her my best navigation advice, “I don’t know where we are. I don’t know which way for you to turn. I don’t have a clue where we should go.”
  Following my close directions in that manner we make it to the highway. We race along at snail’s pace to wherever these people think is the right place to go. Now we know what the Lemmings in the middle of the line must have felt when heading to the cliff! “Wonder where all these guys are going. So many surely can’t be wrong, I’ll just fall in line and see where it takes me.”
 At last my crafty navigation (Rene might tell it another way) gets us heading to distant lights we see up on a hill. Right now we are liking to see lights way up on some hill.
 All the locals are zooming around like they know where they are going, turning down this street, and off into that house. We imagine they are just getting off work and racing home to save their trinkets before they race themselves up some secret mountain where they will be saved from the big wave and the lost tourists.
 We are up some hill getting into houses but the cars behind are going crazy trying to push around us in our floundering.
“Pull over into this driveway,” I shout with great navigation knowledge. It seems there has been a tad bit of shouting going on inside this rental car. Seems like a family vacation now, lots of shouting and just a little bit of driving.
 We are trying to decide what to do when a girl comes out of the house to see who the crazies are in her yard.
Using our best Hawaiian we inform her we are tourists ( That was no surprise as most everyone on the island is as well) and don’t have a clue where to go to be safe for the night in the tsunami.
 The gracious girl has only been on the island a short time, but she grabs a neighbor from next door and the kind man gives us good directions on how to get to a rescue center just up the way from where we are parked. He even gives us a route around most of the traffic.
 Rene drives the little SUV through the subdivision and into a shopping mall of some sort, and we pull in with a kazillion other people and settle in for the long, long night.
We were not informed of the proper way to spend a tsunami night in a parking lot. These local people were well versed in the proper educate of tsunami survival. The little trinkets they had raced home to save from the wave, were cases of beer! The parking lot was a roaring party.
Rene and I were so exhausted from flying for the past 15 hours that the last place we wanted to be was the parking lot tango. At about midnight we drove to a quieter place and drifted off to sleep in half reclined seats, just one notch better than a plane.
Nothing like a romantic night in a car with my wife!  It was so hot outside that we couldn’t leave the windows down for air so we had to keep starting the car for some air-conditioning.  At about two thirty in the morning we woke from our spotty sleep to find the parking lots empting out. It must be over.
We (Rene) drove an hour to our place of abode and finally crawled into bed at about 4:40 A.M.        Welcome to Hawaii!