Here's a big monkeypod tree behind Queen Emma's Summer Palace, one of our stops on our last day in Hawai'i:

                           

Well, we're home again.

It took a while - maybe not as long as one might think, seeing as to how it's a journey that could simply not be done at all as little as one thousand years ago; two hundred years ago, it would have taken months on a sailboat. A hundred years ago, weeks on a steamer ship - both of those are just the ocean parts, in addition to the overland travel time.

We left HNL at 9:50 Tuesday night and got into PHX at 9:15 Wednesday morning - that's including a layover in SLC.

The last day on Oahu felt disjointed, to me. We kept waiting for the remnants of Hurricane Felicia (editor's note: I've been asked several times why this was a "hurricane" and not a "typhoon" - at first I didn't know, then somehow picked up the idea that a typhoon forms in the SOUTH Pacific, below the equator - I've since determined that a "typhoon" forms west of the International Date Line) but the dang storm never showed up - but we were always waiting for it to hit, and sort of living in the shadow of a storm that never happened.

We stopped at Queen Emma's Palace - Silas and Ethel toured for a half hour, then Ethel spent an hour and a half in the gift shop (I was taking a nap on a park bench outside - I was preparing for the redeye flight home by not taking in any caffeine after my single morning cup of coffee, so I was ready to take a nap anywhere, anytime). We got a spot or two of rain during this two hours, but that's Hawai'i - one of the local jokes is giving directions by saying "go straight down this street and take a left at the first shower".

After leaving Queen Emma's (by dragging Ethel away from the gift shop) we had less money in our pockets and less room in our luggage (Ethel wasn't just talking in the gift shop) and we headed down to Waikiki - since it was sunny, it just seemed to make sense to me, but it didn't make sense to Ethel, so some argument ensued, after which we were on the beach, but I was feeling guilty - but I think that we finally achieved equanimity, just in time for me to head down to the gym (24Hour Fitness has a gym on Kalakaua Boulevard, right along Waikiki) and get my workout in (excuse me - get in my workout).

Here was the view looking at my dreadmill at the Waikiki 24Hour Fitness Club:

                                              
....I could run on the dreadmill and watch people surf much better than I'll ever be able to do (which wasn't particularly inspiring). The lack of inspiration might have had something to do with the lack of caffeine; the lack of caffeine was affecting everything else in my life at the same time (for instance, the proper response to "Honey, does this Aloha shirt make my butt look big?" is not "uhh...zzzzz") but I did enjoy just being at this really neat gym. I was hoping that doing this workout in the late afternoon would help me sleep on the plane; it turns out that that doesn't work, either. It just helped me be tired on the plane, which is not the same thing at all.

I also stopped by the 'uke store and bought some 'uke strings (yes, I bought a n'ukulele - the reason that I'm typing that ' in front of the word is because the word is actually pronounced "OO-kuh-lay-lee", not "YUKE'-yew-lay-lee" - it's a Portuguese word, not a Hawaiian word, and the fact that 'ukulele has a vowel sound at the start means that you say '"an 'ukulele" rather than "a ukulele") and picked up our CD of photos from our scuba trip - Ethel will be uploading those at some point - then we got together and had dinner at Cheeseburger in Paradise, stopped at Coldstone Creamery where they had ice cream and I had sorbet, and we watched the sun set on Waikiki, still without any sign of a hurricane:

                     

So we spent the day waiting for a hurricane that never happened (which isn't a bad thing, although it might have been nice to see the surf that a Pacific hurricane might kick up) - and now we're back in Arizona, where we've gotten plenty of rain, strangely enough, since we got home.

I'm glad to be home; I now think that a three week vacation is just a little too long. I could see staying in Hawai'i for two or three months, but only if I could get some work done along the way; but not working for three weeks pretty much wore me out. When you're sitting on the beach in Hawai'i and wishing that you were back home, something is horribly wrong : )