1/6/06, 12:03AM (Honolulu time)
After a very long flight, we arrived today in Honolulu, Oahu. An hour to LA, then a two-hour layover, and five and a half more hours to Hawaii. Worth every minute. We stepped off the plane and walked to the baggage claim through the open-air airport. Beautiful balmy air with just enough humidity to make breathing fun breezed across the paneless windows. When we got to the luggage carousel, Dad went to find the restroom. I asked him where it was when he came back.

"Just around the corner," he said, "to the right of the sign that looks like it says 'No Toilets.'"

Turned out that sign was actually two. The one in the foreground read, "Toilets," and the one in the aft read, "No Entry." The superimposition, however, was not well planned. Someone's sense of timing was good, though. As soon as I entered a stall in the bathroom, the fire alarm went off. I bolted out and saw the blue light in the box marked "FIRE ALARM" blinking to the rhythm of the siren. Then the PA system came on--with a typical canned unattended baggage announcement. Then Hawaiian music started playing and the fire alarm went off. Evidently, as I found out when I rejoined my family at the baggage carousel, the alarm had only gone off in the bathroom. Go figure.

We hailed a cab to take us to our hotel on Wakiki. The cruise line, which had placed us at this hotel, had given us two rooms. Mom and I took the one overlooking Wakiki Beach. I think I could have spent the whole vacation there quite happily, although I did get quite the case of vertigo looking off the balcony of our twelfth-story room. Hawaii is much different than I imagined. Yes, I expected development, especially in this area, but the drive to the hotel reminded me more of a hilly Santa Monica than anything else. I was expecting it to be more like the Caribbean: developed but on a smaller scale, with mom-and-pop type shops and less glitz. If you added gambling, this could be Las Vegas.

1/7/06, 8:04 PM Hawaii time

Dad, of course, wanted to jump in the water at six o'clock this morning. I don't know what it is with him and water. Thankfully, he and Carson had their own room so Carson was the one who got to put up with Dad's antsiness. We met each other in the lobby and went to find breakfast after checking in with the cruise line. The hotel restaurant we stopped at was excruciatingly expensive--try $14 for a waffle. I had a bowl of granola ($6) with macadamia nuts, dried mango, dried pineapple, raisins, and dried bananas. Best granola I've ever had. After that, we walked out across the street to the beach and strolled along it for a good distance. The water was not as cold as it is along California's coast, but definitely not as warm as it is in the Caribbean. After Mom and I tired of sand, we left the guys to play in the water while we went shopping in the beautiful main drag of Wakiki. We bought some very inexpensive, handmade jewelry and other touristy things. By this time, it was nearly time to check out of the hotel, so we returned to our room to clear it out and bid the breathtaking view a mournful farewell. We jumped through the usual hoops and boarded the ship, finding it smaller and older than the last one we were on, but comfy just the same. The freestyle cruising is kind of weird, with no set times for dining. We ate exclusively in the sports bar buffet today, catching parts of a hula show and a talk about shore excursions, and just generally settling in. It's very nice to just be sharing a room with Mom and have the guys next door instead of breathing down our necks. Now if I could just get over my jet lag...*yawns* I need to get a lot done this trip on my computer games and my Sea Scout stuff, and I know it won't all get done. Just thinking about it makes me tired. And I have to go back to school when I return...ergh.

1/8/06, 6:30 pm

Yesterday was our first full day on the ship. We spent the late morning and early afternoon in Hilo, taking in the botanic gardens. It was more of a jungle, really, with huge trees and twisting vines, waterfalls and rugged oceanfront property. The trails were steep in places, but that just added to the beauty. Flowers of every imaginable color were all over, and I took a gazillion pictures of them (and one of Dad impersonating a tiki--that one defies written explanation). The gardens were part jungle and part historic site, housing gravesites of unknown people and explaining legends of some of the various plants. After we returned to the ship via bus, we stuffed ourselves on pizza at the pizza bar near the pool, and spent the rest of the afternoon just bumming around. Mom took a nap while I wroked to Alan Jackson. Heaven, I tell you. That evening, we went to see a show put on by the ship's dancers after dinner. They did all sorts of Polynesian dances, from Tahiti, Fiji, etc. It was interesting to see how the styles and costumes were different (though obviously I wouldn't place a great deal of educational value on such a program). My favorite segment was the tribute to Hollywood's interpretation of hula. The three female dancers donned shiny holographic hula skirts of different colors, plastic leis, and danced to Elvis Presley's "Hula Baby." We went to bed exhausted, with an early day in the morning. Sleep had been in short supply since the first evening, so we were looking forward to getting some. Around three in the morning, I awoke to Mom in the bathroom trying to stop the flow of water OUT of the toilet. Evidently, our entire bathroom floor was flooded. She called the emergency number, and we ended up with three foreign men in our room trying to fix it. They turned the water off eventually and that was the end of our excitement for that evening.

1/11/06, 5:43pm
First of two days in Lahaina, Maui, saw us tendering to port around nine-thirty. Tendering, so called because one is transported in a tender (a small boat that carries people from ship to shore), is always interesting to me because aboard cruise ships it is normally done in one of the lifeboats. It is always interesting to me to see what the inside of a lifeboat looks like. My imagination gets carried away and I picture what it would be like to be crammed into one in the middle of the night (why do disasters always happen in the middle of the night?) to get off a sinking ship. (Fortunately, such situations existed only in said imagination this trip.) After disembarking, we walked along Front Street, a road that bordered the shore. Hawaii is very different than I imagined it in the beach respect: the shores are rugged and rough, with very little sand, at least in the places we have visited. It was beautiful to walk among the open shops and see the ocean just beyond the wall flanking the sidewalk. It was cloudy, unlike the stereotypical picture I had of perpetual sun, but the sea breeze was still welcome.

After browsing the shops for a while, we headed back over to our excursion for the day, a two and a half hour sail aboard the 1987 America's Cup contender America II. Evidently, most America's Cup ships are scrapped after they are raced because they are such specialty vessels and are so expensive to maintain. We removed our shoes, boarded, got our photo snapped in front of the mast, and sat down on the starboard side after asking one of the two guides which side we should sit on.
"Which do you want?" asked the guide. "The shower or the bathtub?"
It took us about a half an hour to get out of the bay (during which trip we saw several whales) and into the wind before the guides cut the motor and unfurled the sails. The bow sliced through the waves, spraying us all and collecting in the port side--the "bathtub" the guide had referred to earlier. It was exhilarating, and a little scary. We were going around eleven knots and she heeled at a list of maybe thirty degrees to port. It was pretty extreme compared to what I've experienced. I was sorry to see it end. I think I am now addicted to sailing; pretty odd considering I'm scared of the water! Now I just need to hang on to that excitement for motivation with the Sea Scout Ship!
We went back to the ship that afternoon and took a "Caribbean line dancing" lesson. The pedantic in me noted that line dancing is most definitely a Texas kind of thing, and the Caribbean is obviously not Hawaii. But it was fun, and that evening when they had dancing at the pool deck, we knew what we were doing (nice for a change!). We danced for a long time, with the staff leading us, and then the staff selected twelve ladies (including Mom and I) and three gentlemen (including my father) and assigned one guy to every four women. Dad got put with Mom and I. The announcer then announced that it was time for the "Queen Komonawana Lei" (I swear I did not make that up) contest. In short, we got to take the men down below and use everything we could grab from a box of sundry female accoutrements to transform them into beauty contestants. My father got put into a flapper-esque dress, orange wig, and I got to do his makeup (bright red lipstick and purple eyeshadow with heavy pink blush). Then we ladies were ushered outside until the "contestants" were called out one by one. They each danced around the stage and got "interviewed" by the DJ (they were given short scripts). My father's song? "I'm Too Sexy." When interviewed, he gave his name as Juanita Valdez, and his occupation as coffee grinder ("I grind so fine," he said, swiveling his hips). When asked why he should be Queen Komonawana Lei, he answered, "Because I'm good," here he plumped up his "bra," "to the last drop." Cue enormous applause here. I will have nightmares about this for the rest of my life.
The next day, the guys went scuba diving while Mom and I shopped. I got a "Maui Lifeguard" t-shirt and did my part to fight sexism by purchasing a male hula dancer doll for my dashboard. We basically just relaxed, going to get ice cream, perusing some art galleries, buying some costume jewelry etc. Not spending much money is sometimes the most fun thing to do. We met back up at the ship, ordered pizza from room service, and just chilled out. I finished my Clive Cussler, did some Sea Scout research, and did about five thousand bytes of WROK. We went to bed early, though I didn't sleep well as the sea was rather rough and our ceiling would squeak every time she listed.

This morning, we were in Kauai. We went to a small beach, and then all went shopping at Hilo Hattie's together and had a blast not buying much of anything. Dad then returned to the beach to take a surfing lesson and we didn't see him again until around four. I hope I'm as crazy as my father is when I'm fifty. Now we are under way again, headed this time for Fanning Island, a thousand or so miles off of Kauai's coast. It will be two days until we get there. It is supposedly merely an atoll, or a ring of coral covered in sand with a lagoon in the middle. It sounds rather like Easter Island, another place I would love to visit, in the respect that it is small, barely populated, and hardly visited. It is owned by Norwegian Cruise Lines and they are the only ones who run any sort of transportation to and from the island. Pretty remote. Should be interesting.

1/12/16
Spent most of today sleeping late, doing a little line dancing (real stuff this time), and learning how to make a flower lei. Mom and I walked around on deck while we were under way. The wind was so strong you could actually lean against it. (My hair was a nightmare afterward.) The sea spray was being blown so fiercely that by the time it landed on a surface, the water had evaporated and left only salt. You could run your hand along the banister surfaces and the hand would be covered in salt when you looked at it. When we came in, we were both sticky from being coated in the stuff, but it was great fun. At the very top, you could look in three-hundred and sixty degrees and see nothing but water. Breathtaking, really. Right now we are so far from civilization that not even a helicopter can reach us, which is kind of a scary thought, though it's exciting too. The waves are quite high, driven by the wind, and the vessel pitches and rolls a lot. Sometimes it is hard to walk straight because the floor is moving so much. I can only imagine what it would have been like for those men who crossed the seas with no idea of what lay ahead, no sophisticated vessels, no global positioning system to tell them where they were. I'm going to go home and reread Kon Tiki, and be even more amazed by it now than I was when I first read it.
In other news, we watched I, Robot. Fun but unremarkable, and though I haven't read the Asimov it's based on, I would be willing to venture that it bears slight resemblance to the story.
Oh yeah, I almost forgot. Plan B passed the 200000 byte mark today at 4:40PM. Yesss.

1/13/06
Today is Friday the 13th. Mwahaha. Er, yeah, whatever. But it might explain why our toilet overflowed TWICE last night. When the plumber came in, he said, "I think I know what the problem is. We're having a problem with one of the engines and we had to shut the water off." THIS IS NOT GOOD TO HEAR AT TWO AM NINE HUNDRED MILES FROM LAND KTHXBYE. When he came back, he clarified that one of the water pipes was broken and they had to shut the water off to replace it. :-P So that was our excitement for the evening.

Other than an argument with my brother over basic arithmetic (i.e., he thinks that counting on his fingers equals addition), today was unremarkable. We all attended a little craft demo and made kukui nut leis that are very pretty. This afternoon, we are going to do some actual line dancing, and later tonight, we are going to go see Sahara in the little cinema. I'm excited; I've been wanting to see this movie. I'm (Geek alert! Geek alert!!) a huge Clive Cussler fan. Dirk Pitt is the ultimate Boy Scout. X-D (As if being excited about line dancing weren't geeky enough, right?)

Hmm, what else? Found two huge messy bugs and one illogical plot twist in Plan B and I think I fixed everything after much hair-pulling. I've got at *least* a hundred thousand bytes to go, though, so it's looking like finishing the first draft will be pushed back maybe as far as spring break in March, as opposed to the end of January like I had anticipated. (I have to work equestrian home shows every bloody weekend in February or I would estimate finishing sooner.) I need to work on the Sea Scout annual calender for my Ship and figure out the Council's annual calendar of Venturing events. *sigh* And I miss my horsey. :-(

The wind has calmed, meaning one can actually walk without looking like a drunk. According to the captain's address this morning, yesterday the winds were between 40 and 50 knots (or nautical miles per hour, however they measure winds on the sea--my inner Sea Scout is ashamed to be caught without this particular piece of trivia), and today it is only between 30-35. (Our door is still creaking something awful, though. The guys, just next door, do not have this problem nor the toilet-overflowing one. Hrmph.) Our latitude is currently nine degrees north, with Fanning Island sitting just three degrees north of the equator. Apparently, the only visitors to the island are this cruise ship and a supplies ship that comes three to four times a year. Talk about remote! There's no electricity, and only a few people have generators. The island is really three small islands close to one another. Each is ten miles long by half a mile wide. The tallest point on any of them is like ten feet above sea level. I'm pretty excited, considering this is a place hardly anyone gets to see. I'll take lots of photos. ;-)

1/14/06, 9:55 PM

Couple of comments on the Sahara movie: First, the casting, except for Sandecker, was completely wrong. Giordino is supposed to be a muscular little Italian, and he looked like he could have been an Irishman with that strawberry blonde hair. He's also definitely NOT the practical joker he was portrayed as, though it made for an interesting character. He, Pitt, and Gunn should have been older, should have appeared as more polished and classier instead of like beach bums, and should have come off as skilled and smart instead of just lucky. There was also too much concentration on who's-shooting-who and not enough on the plot development. But it was still enjoyable.

Today was extremely wow. I don't know where to start. Fanning Island looks just like Gilligan's Island. In fact, it was filmed for the show: When the beginning credits roll, the title appears over footage of Fanning Island, and any time you see the island from afar, it is a view of Fanning. That is what I am told, at least. There are no paved streets and no cars on the island. Everyone gets around by bike. When we disembarked, we were greeted by the locals singing their traditional songs in their traditional language--Gilbertese. We then walked up a dirt path for several minutes to get to Napali Beach, a beautiful white sand beach. (It is the most beautiful sand I have ever seen; almost pure white and very, very fine and soft. Except where the coral grows. I cut up my feet pretty well on that stuff. Ouch.) The path was scattered with "street" vendors who would have wares they had made (mostly shell crafts and palm weavings) for sale on a small table under a coconut palm every few yards. Dad bought a tiki carving. Carson bought a shark's tooth knife. Sludge had a bone. (Million bonus points to anyone who gets that reference.)

Anyhow...

We swam in the huge lagoon that is in the center of Fanning. It is very shallow for most of the way. You could walk for a hundred yards or more and still only be up to your knees. We rented a HobieCat and went sailing, despite not knowing what we were doing, and I had the time of my life. Dad and I were on the cat first, and then Dad traded with Carson. The switch was rather ungraceful. Dad got off, but Carson was still a ways away and I had started to catch wind already. Brilliant brother decides he is going to stop the cat by STANDING IN FRONT OF IT (still shallow water, remember?). So he stands between the pontoons and grabs it. He stops it, but is distracted by my father talking to us. Next thing I know, the wind catches the sail really hard, I look to the bow, and Carson is UNDER the boat. I sailed right over him and he came out the stern a-okay. That boy has more lives than a cat. I was so worried about him that I failed to see a large rock embankment I was coming upon. By the time I noticed, it was too late to turn. Fortunately, the cat wasn't damaged and Carson helped me push it back out. We sailed for another couple of hours uneventfully, learning hands-on how the water and the wind move the boat, tacking, jibing, letting out the sheets, pulling in the sheets, beating, reaching, running, hiking, getting caught in irons, and occasionally getting stuck on a large outcropping of hard coral. (The coral was not damaged.) The deepest the water was was perhaps ten feet deep; usually it was in the three- to five-foot range and the most incredible aquamarine blue. Though it's odd for a landlubber who is afraid of the water, I think I am addicted to sailing. To quote Wind in the Willows, "There is nothing so grand as messing about in boats."*

*Please note that this is an approximate quote as my brain is too tired to remember anything except that there is a line somewhere in Wind in the Willows which runs something to that effect.

The next couple of days we spent at sea were pretty rough, but still fun. When we went to dinner, the waiters would pour the water in between rocks of the boat. I'm just glad no one got seasick. The last day, we were in Kona, Hawaii. Apparently the Big Island is big horse country: there are several ranches of several thousand acres on it. We booked an excursion on one of these ranches. The guys went ATVing and mom and I went horseback riding. None of this nose-to-tail, stuff, either. These were ranch horses and they really knew how to get up a gallop. I was a little scared at first, never having gone that fast before, but it was the most exhilarating thing I think I have ever done. (I was sore for the next three days.) My horse, a golden palomino named Sunny (how original), was a bit of a stubborn boy, but by the end of the ride we had fixed that. ;-) I can't imagine a more beautiful place for riding, either. The hills were covered in foot-long green grass, and you could see the ocean stretch away in the distance.

We got home at 2AM Thursday morning. I got up four hours later to start school. It all seems surreal now. I was free to do whatever I wanted, whenever I wanted, for however long I wanted to do it. Now I'm back in school, driving to Fresno every day, with no time to do anything I really want to do (though I have managed to squeeze in the odd hour for my latest addiction, Sid Meier's Pirates! game). Maybe I'll find time to get the photos downloaded soon.

La"Hang loose is now my motto"Zorra