Ron's Big Life Update - February 2007

Well, THAT was fun!

Thirteen days in Hawaii really hits the spot in January. The flight is eight hours in the air, and Hawaii is four hours behind Minnesota this time of year (they don’t use daylight saving time.) The temperature was around 85°F (29°C) when we left Hawaii, and was exactly 1°F (-17°C) when our plane landed last night in Minneapolis. I’m completely scrambled today, and it will take a few days to feel like myself again.

We spent six days on the island of Kauai and seven more on the island of Maui. Liz and I both enjoyed Kauai WAY more than Maui. Maui was far more commercial than Kauai, and had a lot of little pseudo-villages that cruise ships use for docking. I suppose it’s great if you’re into that, but we wanted to stay far off the beaten path and away from crowds of tourists, and Kauai fit the bill quite a bit better.

We asked for the tiniest rental car we could get, and they gave us a two-door Chevy Cobalt. Ugh. Decent gas mileage and handled reasonably well, but it had a blind spot so large that they might as well have not even bothered with a rear windshield. The comically large suitcase that held Liz’s wedding dress fit in the back seat, but it wasn’t easy.

The rental cars in Hawaii were really easy to spot – 90% of them are Ford Mustang convertibles, and the other 10% are random Chevy cars like our Cobalt. Without exaggeration, I’d say that 25% of the cars in our hotel’s parking lot and about 10% of the cars on any given road were Ford Mustang convertibles. Ford must be building these things just for the Hawaiian rental market, because I can’t imagine they’re selling that many new Mustang convertibles!

I just could not get the hang of the street and town names out there, which are all in Hawaiian. Hawaiian has only 5 vowels (a, e, i, o, u) and 7 consonants (h, k, l, m, n, p, w), or a little less than half of the English alphabet. As I see it, this means that the words need to be about twice as long in order to convey the same meaning. I could barely remember the names of the towns where we were staying, and I had no luck whatsoever remembering any other towns or street names. To me, they might as well have been in binary!

Like the Hebrew word “shalom,” the Hawaiian word “aloha” means lots of things – “hello,” “goodbye,” “love,” and if I’m not mistaken, “let’s eat!” Some of the shops had keychains with English first names and their Hawaiian equivalents, so I learned that “Liz” is “Lika,” “Elizabeth” is “Elikapeka,” and “Ron” is “Lona.” I couldn’t find our cat “Poohead” on the keychains, but we agreed to change his name to either “Pu’uhead” (from the word “pu’u”, which is a round protuberance, like a hill), or “Po’ipuhead” (in honor of Po’ipu Beach, where we got married.) The word “mo’o” means “lizard.” Good times!

Getting around on Kauai and Maui was amazingly easy, even if I couldn’t pronounce or recognize any of the street names. There aren’t any roads on the interior of the islands, just the outer edge, so it made navigation very simple. The big highway (actually, just a well-paved two-lane road) goes around the island from town-to-town, and there are signs that list the towns and appropriate mileages to each. So you don’t actually have to know what street you’re on, only the name of the town where you want to go. Then follow the signs and arrows. Easy. We drove quite a bit more on Maui, just because the hotel was WAY far away from everything we wanted to do. In the 7 days we were on Maui, I put over 1000 miles on the car!

Liz and I brought plastic water bottles everywhere we went. We noticed that each time we re-capped the bottle at a high elevation, then drove down to near sea level, the bottle became severely dented due to the change in pressure. (Outside air pressure increases, forces the fixed amount of gas in the bottle to contract to equalize pressure, bottle gets squashed.) This happened on almost every drive we took, and more often than not arrived back at our hotel with squashed water bottles.

Kauai (and maybe a few of the other islands) has an unusual problem. In 1992, Hurricane Iniki destroyed a chicken farm, and all the chickens and roosters were scattered and set free. Since then, they have completely taken over the island, and there are wild chickens and roosters everywhere on Kauai. For real – I’m not making this up. On every square inch of the island, if you stop and listen for a few seconds, the odds are pretty good that you’ll hear a “Cock A Doodle Doo!” And it’s not just the waking hours; the roosters crow pretty much around the clock. To me, utterly hilarious! A lush, tropical paradise, with some of the finest scenery in the world, all punctuated by a less-than-dignified “Cock A Doodle Doo!” The baby chicks are awfully cute, and we got a few pictures of them.

One day at a restaurant, Liz and I had the following conversation. Since the wild chickens are everywhere, you think that maybe some people have them as pets? If they do, what do you think their names would be? I suggested “Peeps.” Liz suggested “Cluck-Cluck.” Peeps and Cluck-Cluck. Hey! It sounds like a wacky morning radio show: “Tune in to Peeps and Cluck-Cluck at 7:20 for the Song Of The Day, Birthday Bucks, and The Phrase That Pays!” Peeps and Cluck-Cluck. That’s pure gold! We could give away Cluck-Cluck Bucks! It became a running joke for our entire stay in Hawaii.

One thing you immediately notice in the Honolulu airport is that much of it is open to the outside air, without windows or air conditioning. While this would be laughable and most unwelcome in Minnesota, it works just fine in Hawaii, where the temperature swing isn’t all that different between the winter and summer months. Most of the restaurants we found also had outside seating or some kind of open-air structure to it. With all this outdoor seating, you tend to see a lot of birds flying around, even inside the airport. Peeps and Cluck-Cluck.

We arrived at night on a Thursday (1/18), unpacked, and did nothing else of importance. Friday (1/19) was entirely devoted to wedding stuff, and was probably the most spectacular day of my life.

The first thing we did Friday morning was buy bananas at a local grocery. Then, we walked across the street to the “Office Of The Governor” to get our marriage license. We needed 60 dollars in cash, plus our driver’s licenses.

The woman who worked there must have the best job in all of state government. All she does is meet with happy couples who want to get married. No angry people complaining about something or protesting charges filed against them. Just happy people, two at a time, usually from the mainland.

She gave us a set of guidelines on how we were allowed to change our names for free. I think it amounts to: I could use Liz’s middle or last name as my middle or last name, and vice versa. Can’t change my last name to Ignatowski. Can’t change my first name at all. Just middle or last names. I think hyphens are allowed, although it’s hard to imagine anyone would want to be “Visser-Gerber” or “Gerber-Visser.” I was surprised to see that I, as the groom, was also allowed to change my name; I guess I always assumed it was just the bride who got an option to change her name. Not sure if I’m allowed to be “Ronald Anne.”

Liz decided to take the name Gerber. She’s now “Elizabeth Anne Gerber.” Not bad, eh? And although I’ll miss “ElVis,” I now have “EAGer” to replace it. She had trouble deciding what to do, and hadn’t made up her mind until it was time to sign the papers during the ceremony. She told the pastor she wasn’t sure if she wanted to change her name because she had been “Visser” for a long time, and it would be weird to change it. He told her that she’d have to decide whether to become a “Gerber” or stay a “Visser,” except he mispronounced “Visser” as “VY-zer,” which happens to Liz all the time. That did it. Right there, Liz decided to leave all the mispronunciations behind her and became a Gerber. Like the baby food. Laugh if you will, but nobody misspells or mispronounces Gerber like the baby food.

The ceremony was short and wonderful. The only attendees were Liz’s brother, Liz’s parents, my brother and his girlfriend, my mother, and a friend of my mom’s so she’d have someone to travel with. Seven guests total, which is a very manageable number. The men all wore white shirts, no ties, and the women wore comfortable dresses. Very informal, and perfect for the casual Hawaiian vibe.

Liz got her hair and nails done for the ceremony. When I took apart her hair afterwards, I recovered three orchids, one rubber band and 38 bobby pins. I estimate that Liz’s fancy ‘do required about three cans of hairspray.

I was expecting Liz to bawl her eyes out during the ceremony (I’ve seen her cry during TV commercials!), but she didn’t. She later told me that she’d gotten that all out of her system beforehand. As Liz was waiting to walk down to the ceremony, a little girl came up to her with her mother, and told Liz that she “looked pretty” and “looked like Cinderella.” That did it – Liz burst out crying and frantically tried to mop up the tears before they streaked her makeup. After the good cry, she regained her composure and walked down to the ceremony with her father for the Big Entrance.

I was completely awestruck at how superb Liz looked. When I first caught sight of her walking down the hill to the ceremony, I think my exact words were “I am the luckiest guy in the world.” So true.

We had an acoustic guitarist who played some background music before and after the ceremony. Seemed like a nice guy, although he didn’t say much. The only songs I remember him playing were “The Girl From Ipanema,” “Bonanza,” and “Mr. Bojangles,” but I’m sure there were more. My cousin, Beth, had a guitarist at her wedding last year, and I found it to be very tasteful – sort of the opposite of the usual DJ/dance floor party. Very fortunate, then, that our hotel offered the guitarist as part of their standard wedding package.

Our photo-grapher took some fine posed and candid shots before, during and after the ceremony. He also stayed an extra half hour to take some terrific candid shots as Liz and I frolicked on the beach afterward. If you’re only wearing the dress once, why not get it full of sand?

The pastor was from a church down the street, and performed a non-denom-inational ceremony. Nice guy, great sense of humor; my vow had something about allowing Liz to buy as many dresses as she wants.

The ceremony itself was maybe a half hour, tops. We then uncorked a bottle of champagne, drank a little toast, pretended to cut the cake but didn’t because we were saving the cake for later, and wandered down the beach a few hundred feet to our very own table-for-nine at the hotel’s luau.

The food at the luau was buffet style, and was pretty good. The Mai Tais were flowing freely, but I had only a few sips of one, and I don’t think Liz had any. Odd, but that was pretty much the only alcohol we had for the entire trip, except for a small bottle of champagne supplied by the hotel. Apparently, we’re not big drinkers.

Luau entertainment is largely choreographed dancing to some traditional Hawaiian music. The dancers go through costume changes and occasionally use props, but it’s mostly the band playing and singing with the dancers dancing. Some of the props involve fire, which is always appreciated.

Of course, since we were sitting at the head table, the emcee saw it fit to embarrass us a-plenty. They brought us out on stage, they made us dance together, and other good-natured fun stuff like that. There must have been quite a few people at that luau, because Liz and I got recognized at least three separate times over the next few days. From total strangers on the beach: “Hey, you’re Ron and Liz! Congratulations!” We got to be celebrities for a weekend.

All in all, I wouldn’t have changed a thing. I can’t imagine anything being more perfect and more beautiful than Liz, our families, and our sweetly modest ceremony on the beach at Po’ipu.

The next day, we played tourist a little, had dinner with the families, and after that we were on our own for the next 12 days.

We settled into a routine pretty easily. Wake up, brush teeth, shave face (just Ron), put sunblock on entire body, put on short sleeve shirt, bathing suit, sandals and hat, and head out the door. In the 12 days of vacation, we only needed long pants and socks twice, for a bike ride and a helicopter ride (details below.) We showered at night, so that we didn’t gloop up the sheets with sand and sunblock.

At this point, I should recommend two guide books that were completely indispensable: The Ultimate Kauai Guidebook and Maui Revealed. They’re both small, blue-covered paperbacks, and were outstanding in every way. The books are really well-known on the islands, and their reviews of activities and restaurants were absolutely essential to our trip. They’re written by people who live on the respective islands, and there’s no advertising at all. Some of the merchants prominently display their good reviews from the books. The only times we got skunked were when we departed from the book’s recommendations. In short, if you’re going to Hawaii, you really need to pick up these books.

After the wedding, we had four or five more days on Kauai. It’s a fairly small island, with only about 60,000 people on it. It’s not touristy at all, and we enjoyed it much more than Maui, which has more than its share of touristy stuff. You go to Kauai to enjoy nature and some of the cool local shops and restaurants, and that’s exactly what we did.

We spent a day in Waimea Canyon on the west side of the island. Like a lot of things in Hawaii, it’s accessible only by a steep, twisty, two-lane road. The car handled these pretty well, and I drove most those miles in the “I” gear, which probably stands for “intermediate.” Just plain gorgeous.

On the way back from the Canyon, we stopped at a little hole-in-the-wall for “shave ice,” a local treat. Not shaveD ice, just shave ice. It’s a cup of finely ground ice with syrup poured on top of it, and sometimes sitting on a bed of ice cream. My description conjures up a sno-cone, but it’s actually much better than a sno-cone if it’s made right. We got instructions not to jab it with the spoons, or it would fall over. You shave it onto the spoons.

The hole-in-the-wall was called “JoJo’s,” and it was literally a little shack on a street in Waimea. The owner said he used to be in the military and got some local land cheap, so he grows his own fruit and makes his own syrups. They were astoundingly good, and we have no reason to doubt him. Our favorite were the guava, mango and passionfruit syrups – you could get all three in the shave ice, over a bed of macadamia nut ice cream. Ooh – crazy good! We returned the next day for more.

The best meal we had on Kauai was probably a lunch we had at another hole-in-the-wall called “Mark’s Place,” which is a catering outfit that also makes to-go lunches, which you either bring back to work with you or eat at a picnic bench in the shade outside the shop. No tables inside.

The local favorite is called a “mixed plate,” which has rice and one or two other meat dishes on it. I think the tradition started from the way that the sugar cane farm workers were served lunch, with Japanese and Korean workers working side-by-side with the natives and eventually exchanging food styles. As a result, a lot of the truly local dishes are a combination of Polynesian, Japanese and Korean style, and they’re really good. Not spicy at all – they’re more of a soothing flavor. There was a teriyaki beef dish that was quite good – beef sliced super-thin, gentle teriyaki flavoring, and served over lo mein noodles or over rice. We also liked chicken katsu, a dish with fried chicken cut into thin strips and served with rice. I really liked the whole “mixed plate” style, and I found them far more interesting than sandwiches or the usual American lunches.

We also loved the pineapples out there. They were completely free from any of the bitterness that you usually get from mainland pineapples. We found out why. As I understand it, you plant the little spiky leaves from the top of the pineapple. Each set of spiky leaves produces three or four pineapples, with each one smaller than the last. The huge first ones get sent to the mainland, which is probably consistent with our bigger-is-better mindset. But the later smaller ones are actually the sweetest, because they have the same sugar content as the bigger pineapples. The smaller ones are called “Maui Golds,” and they’re not exported. Holy moly, those are good! I probably ate my weight in pineapple on Maui!

While we were on Kauai, we played in the ocean a little at some of the beaches. We rented boogie boards and quickly realized that we have no discernible boogie board skills. Liz claims that she successfully rode a wave onto shore, but I didn’t see it, and I remain skeptical. Mostly, it was just the ocean beating the crap out of us. I got tossed around pretty good, like a “dork in the ocean.” If it’s a battle of man vs. ocean, the ocean will certainly win every time. I suppose that’s why all the bodies that wash up on shore are dead…

There was a small area on the beach near our hotel that was sectioned off so that monk seals could rest and sleep there. Monk seals are endangered, and the locals go way out of their way to make sure they’re protected.

One day we drove up to the north edge of Kauai. The road got smaller and smaller, until it finally ended at Ke’e Beach. I especially enjoyed the warning signs posted at the beach, which show all the fun things the ocean can do to a stick figure.

This particular beach was at the very edge of the Na Pali Coast, and had some spectacular rocks and hiking trails. We hiked a teeny bit, and took some unbelievable pictures. Hard to believe that places like this actually exist, but they do.

We watched some crabs crawling on the rocks at the beach. Not only do they cling to the rocks very well so that they don’t get washed out to sea, but they can actually jump from rock to rock. We had no idea! Crabs go BOING!

And on the way back, we stopped at another little hole-in-the-wall called “Red Hot Mama’s” for the best burritos we’ve ever had. Thank you, guide book! We also stopped at one particular fruit stand for a “frosty,” which is made from frozen bananas and frozen pineapples that are fed through a Champion Juicer and come out with the consistency of soft-serve ice cream. Deeee-licious!

On that same return trip from the north edge, we were delayed by a traffic accident. Some guy was making an illegal U-turn on one of the narrow roads and a bus hit him. We were there before the ambulance was, and it made quite a mess of traffic. They let only a handful of cars through, and we were quite literally the last car to get through before they closed the road for two hours. There was nobody behind me for the rest of the drive back.

The bus belonged to Polynesian Adventure Tours, which is ubiquitous on the islands. From what we saw, they cart older folks around to many of the more touristy sites. We saw quite a few on our drive through Waimea Canyon, and they stopped and let people out at the bigger rest stops. I think they must be a punchline to the locals; they were certainly a punchline for us! We were pretty confident that we wouldn’t run into any tour buses at the yummy hole-in-the-wall places we were eating!

The highlight of the Kauai visit was, of course, the wedding, but a close second was a helicopter ride across the whole island. If you ever visit the island of Kauai, this is most definitely THE thing to do! The company that we used (and there are a few, some better than others) uses door-less helicopters with four passengers. Pilot and two in front (that’s where we sat) and two more in back. You’re strapped in tight, so you’re not going anywhere, and you wear headsets to deaden the sound. The pilot talks to you through the headsets, and the passengers all have microphones so they can talk back and ask questions. Our pilot was terrific. He grew up on Kauai, lived for a few years on the mainland (St. Louis), then moved back.

The helicopter ride started out along the southern edge of the island, zig-zagged across Waimea Canyon (where we’d been on foot the day before), flew along the Na Pali Coast along the northern coast (near where we’d be on foot the following day), and landed at a secluded waterfall near the eastern edge of the island, where we ate lunch and swam. The water was really cold so swimming was brief, but long enough to get some amazing pictures. We also got to see the waterfall that was used in one of the “Jurassic Park” movies, and the interior of a volcanic crater that is the wettest spot on earth. Then back to the airport and our rental car. The rest of the day paled a bit in comparison with seeing everything from the air.

We then left Kauai for seven days in Maui. If we had to do it again, we’d spend all our time on Kauai, but we didn’t know that in advance.

For the flight from Kauai to Maui, we sat in First Class. First Class, as you know, is the ultimate in luxury, with terry cloth smoking jackets, foot massages, and ice cream sundaes served every fifteen minutes! Well, it turns out that there’s not a lot of luxury you can cram into an 18-minute flight. Aside from marginally wider armrests and a choice of beverage, there was no real difference between our First Class and the Mere Mortal Class behind us. Our guess is that our travel agent got an upgrade for something like $2, and that was just fine by us. Too bad we couldn’t fly First Class for the flights to and from the mainland.

At the Maui airport, the exchange at the car rental counter went something like this:
“It’s not a Chevy Cobalt, is it?”
“Yes, it is.”
“-groan- What color is it?”
“It’s black.”
“-GROAN-”
Have you ever driven a black car in a hot climate? NO ONE has a black car in a hot climate. When I lived in Tucson, you couldn’t get a black car even if you asked for one. And yet, thanks to Alamo, I had one for an entire week.

Our hotel was on the west side of Maui. Many of the cool things to see were not on the west side of Maui, however, and we drove an absurd amount during our stay there. Without exaggeration, we easily put 1000 miles on the car, which surely has to be more than the total mileage of all roads on the island.

The hotel itself was odd. It was built in the early ‘60s, and portions of it hadn’t been renovated or updated since then. For instance, one would think that each pool at the hotel would have an accompanying hot tub, which is what we found at our Kauai hotel. Nope, this place only had one, tucked between two tennis courts, and you had to walk through a tennis pro shop to get there.

The parking lots were also very strangely shaped, as if they just paved whatever spare areas were available. Parking in the lots was a true nightmare because the painted spots were far too narrow for the cars. Really – they were at least 18 inches more narrow than any other lot I’ve ever seen. It’s as if it were some kind of joke, where the hotel staff spent endless hours watching their ticked-off guests try to squeeze their Ford Mustang convertibles into the impossibly narrow parking spaces.

They initially put us in “the cottages,” which must have been rustic and charming when they were built in 1964. They are certainly not charming now. Tarps on portions of the roof, antiquated and rusting plumbing , a massage shower head that was stuck on massage so you couldn’t take a normal shower, an old, inadequate window air conditioner, and I could go on and on. Liz said it felt like somebody’s lake cabin, and that’s not a compliment. What pushed us over the edge was, well, ants. We found a few ants in the room, and had the management move us to the new tower, which was gorgeous.

The difference between the old cottages and the new tower rooms was striking, and almost comical. The old bar soap and dingy towels of the cottages, versus the luxury body wash and thick, Turkish towels in the tower. The old TV and rickety entertainment center of the cottages, versus the flat-panel hi-def LCD TV and sculpted wooden desk of the new rooms. We found a price list for the rooms, and discovered that the cottages were comparably priced, or in some cases, MORE expensive than these newly-renovated rooms! All the more ridiculous when you consider that the cottages were “to be torn down in, like, two weeks,” according to the manager that moved us. Really. That’s an actual quote.

We got some pictures of our new room, and pictures of our old cottage as taken from our new room. It hadn’t occurred to us to photograph the actual cottage we’d stayed in, so before we checked out, I had the manager let us into a comparable cottage to take pictures. That one wasn’t nearly as awful as ours, but it may convey a fraction of the awfulness.

The new room had some kind of fancy oatmeal bar soap, with abrasive bits of something or other that felt quite pleasant on your skin. Kind of like chunky peanut butter, except in soap. We had packed a bottle of body wash because we’re not big fans of bar soap, with the goal of using it all up so we wouldn’t have to bring it back. All went according to plan, and we discovered that a 24-ounce bottle of body wash can last two people exactly two weeks. Since we only had one pair of sandals each, not counting flip-flops, our feet got pretty stinky, so we ended up using the fancy oatmeal bar soap as sort of a “first responder” soap, to be used before the body wash.

Once we got to Maui, we crammed as many planned activities as we could into our schedule. The days usually involved getting up before dawn, scarfing down a quick breakfast where available, doing some really cool activity, eating lunch, then taking it easy or driving around until it got dark. Then a shower and dinner. Bed by 9-ish, since we were always pooped by the end of the day.

One of the first activities started a wee bit early for us. Up at 2:30 (!!!), waited for a bus to pick us up at the hotel at 3:30 and drive us up to the top of Haleakala Crater, a dormant volcano that’s the highest point on Maui. From there, you got to see the sun rise, which was mighty cool. It was also mighty cold, and we were bundled up as best we could.

Once the sun is up, they give you a mountain bike and let you ride down the paved road from 9000+ ft down to sea level. The bike is designed for this, so it’s unbelievably heavy and has souped-up brakes. Basically, you ride the brakes, stay on the road, and go “oooohh” at the scenery. They keep you in single-file, and keep your speed down to 15-20 MPH, probably so you don’t fly off the mountain and die. It was fun, and it’s awesome to say you biked down the outside of a volcano, but you really don’t get to see as much as you expect to, since you have to keep at least one eye on the road, so you don’t fly off the mountain and die. I also enjoyed the misspelling of the word “bicycles” on the back of their trailer.

While we biked down the north side of the mountain, there was a brush fire on the south side of the mountain. It made the papers.

We drove the road to Hana, a 38-mile long two-lane road that twists and winds through 600+ hairpins turns and runs clockwise along the north edge of Maui. The scenery is to die for, and die you may if you drive too close to the edge of the road. We started early, and we were on the road for about nine hours.

The scenery along the road to Hana was too beautiful to describe. We stopped where the book recom-mended and took pictures wherever we could. After a few hours of Ooh and Aah, we actually got waterfall fatigue. Oh, great, another beautiful waterfall! We wished we could just save up all the beautiful images in our heads, with the ability to spread them out over years and years. Just one of those scenic views can easily keep you happy for a week.

At one point, when we were taking pictures of the ocean from atop a cliff, we noticed that we could see our own shadows in the ocean below. Liz managed to get a picture of us with our arms outstretched!

The book recom-mended a particular fruit stand in a small town off the main road, and the lady there sold us a loaf of extraor-dinarily good banana bread (second only to Liz’s!) That was our lunch.

The road ends at Hana, a pleasant little town with not much character and terrible food. We had the worst burgers of our lives on a beach at Hana. A portion of the beach at Hana had red sand, which was awesome but difficult to photograph.

We also stopped at a beach that had black sand. Same consistency as the usual tan sand, but black. Crazy! We got pictures, but they don’t really do it justice.

As fate would have it, there was an earthquake back in October that knocked out some of the bridges along the southern edge of the island, so instead of driving a big loop all the way around the island as I’d planned, we had to drive back along the same route. Another 3-4 hours of hairpin turns. Ugh. At least I was able to get through most of it while it was still light out.

More warning signs! I think these were at the black sand beach. Oddly enough, both Jellyfish and Manowar were rock groups…

Another day, we went scuba diving. Neither one of us had done anything like this before, so we took an introductory course with an instructor. In a word, it was amazingly amazing. (Okay, two words; it was too amazing to be described by only one word.)

The instructor was great. He was born in a small town in South Dakota, then lived in Alaska for 25 years. From Alaska, he used to go on so many vacations with scuba diving that he thought it made more sense to just move to Hawaii and indulge his hobby full-time as an occupation. He goes on about 10 dives per week as an instructor, and a few more in his off-duty time just for pleasure. THIS is the kind of instructor you want! We drove out to a particular beach that’s used quite a bit for scuba lessons, then he took about an hour to explain the equipment and give us some of the basics. No big class – just Liz and me, plus the instructor.

Rule number one – never hold your breath. You have to breathe normally at all times, which is exactly the opposite of what you learned in your childhood swimming lessons. Underwater, the change in pressure can seriously damage your insides unless you equalize the pressure in your lungs and ears. Equalizing the pressure in your lungs is easy – just keep breathing. You take care of the ear pressure by clearing your Eustachian tubes – your hold your nose through your mask and gently get your ears to pop. Easy. If you don’t do that, you could damage your eardrums. (It’s analogous to our water bottle always ending up crumpled when we capped it at high altitudes and then examined it at sea level. Bad. It’s also the same reason why you shouldn’t fly when you have a head cold. If your Eustachian tubes are clogged, ascending and descending really hurts and can cause eardrum damage.) If I remember right, you’re supposed to equalize your ears each time you change your depth by about one foot.

I had a prescription mask, which allowed me to see underwater as well as I do on land with my glasses. The mask is dry inside, and we learn how to exhale through our noses to drain any leaked water out of our masks. For you optics people, the diopter correction is all done on the inward-facing surface of the plastic mask; the outward-facing surface is flat, so that the mask has the same power at the surface as it does underwater.

You also learn hand signals, which are essential underwater. Our instructor had a little whiteboard so he could write specific instructions to us, or could identify certain fish.

Then we put on a wetsuit (water temperature about 76 degrees), and strapped on our air tanks. They’re heavy, and you have to be extra careful when you’re walking not to fall over. If you do, people will point and laugh. We didn’t fall over.

Then, into some armpit-deep water to practice skills. Getting used to breathing through a regulator in your mouth is pretty challenging, but we did just fine. The instructor later told us that many other people never get to being comfortable enough to rely on the regulator, so those people never actually got to dive. But we did fine. Actually, I confess that I did get a little spooked by being too deep to stick my head up and take a breath whenever I wanted. But I saw that Liz was doing just fine with it, and I told myself that if Liz was just fine with it, so was I. And I was. Somehow, one side of my brain overrode the other side, and I got pretty comfortable with the regulator breathing thing. Later, Liz told me that she had the same initial anxiety, but since she saw that I was doing OK, she told herself that she’d be fine. Funny!

Some of the skills include recovering your regulator if it falls out of your mouth (exhale slowly, since rule number one is never hold your breath, lean to the right, use your arm to sweep where it should be, exhale hard into the regulator to clear it of water, then start breathing again) and using a spare regulator on someone else’s suit (in our case, the instructor’s). I think the most mentally challenging part was practicing the skill of physically removing my regulator when I was underwater, to show that I could find it again and resume breathing. It’s just like how I would imagine newbie skydivers would feel when they have to show that they can leap out of the perfectly good airplane.

The regulator is a pretty slick little device, about the size of your fist, which delivers air from the tank at a pressure just above ambient pressure. It’s got valves so that if it comes loose, it doesn’t leak all your air into the surrounding waters. Cool toy. It’s got a flexible rubber “biteplate” that you gently grip with your teeth, and an outer edge that you put your lips around. It’s pretty comfortable, actually. The regulator is tethered to the air tank by a hard rubber tube that can bend, but likes to be oriented right next to your face, which is very convenient if it comes out of your mouth underwater.

Once you pass the basic skills test, you’re ready to dive. You can control your buoyancy by inflating or deflating a bladder that’s mounted near your shoulders. This is always used to keep you floating upright at the beginning and end of dives, when your head is still above water. It’s also handy as a coarse buoyancy device when you’re underwater. I say “coarse” because the “fine” buoyancy device is your lungs. If you fill your lungs (while you’re breathing normally), you’ll briefly be more buoyant and will float up. Likewise, if you let your lungs completely empty (again while you’re breathing normally), you’ll sink downward. My brain knew all this, but my body didn’t cooperate very well, and I had lots of trouble with buoyancy. I was usually too high above where I wanted to go, and didn’t know how to get down there. We found out afterwards that that’s a very common problem with beginners like us.

Then you dive. It’s an eerie feeling being in water well over your head, with no proverbial “safety net.” You see your instructor and your diving partner, and the water surface well above your head. Yikes! And then, any flashes of panic are completely overridden by the feeling of awe at the first fish that swims by. Holy cow! I’m swimming with the fishes!

Liz and I did most of our dive holding hands. You do most of the swimming with the fins on your feet, and your hands shouldn’t really do much while you’re down there. Holding hands helped keep us together, since we were both total spazzes that couldn’t move very accurately underwater. It also helped us communicate with each other, since you can’t talk too well with a regulator in your mouth.

Actually, you can hear surprisingly well underwater. We were fortunate enough to hear some whale calls while we were down there. It’s in the same frequency range as Chewbacca from the Star Wars movies – much higher than I would have guessed. You can also make out words if somebody says something, so you can tell if your instructor calls you an idiot. (Our instructor used this as an example of bad instruction.)

And we saw fish. Liz is up on what each different species of fish looks like – they all look like fish to me. They all move so elegantly and effortlessly, in such stark contrast to us! We got within a few feet of a pair of butterfly fish (pretty yellow fish that mate for life), and a school of damsels (tiny black fish.) We had instructions not to handle or touch anything down there, out of respect for the coral reefs and their inhabitants. The only things we were to touch were the ones that our instructor handed to us, which he knew would be undamaged by our handling. He handed us a nudibranch (also known as a sea slug), which was about the size of a baseball, and had black and vivid yellow coloring. Underwater, everything is roughly the same density as water, so if you let it go, it just floats there or sinks very gently. So, we had to manually hand the sea slug from our instructor to me, and from me to Liz.

A few minutes into the dive, we saw two manta rays! Not one, but two! We found out later that experienced divers rarely see one, so it was miraculous that we saw not just one, but TWO on our very first dive. Liz got a picture of one of them.

We also saw a huge sea turtle. So clunky-looking on land, and so graceful underwater! No picture, though; we just watched as he (she?) glided by.

We had instructions not to ascend too fast, or we’d form nitrogen bubbles in our blood – that’s the bends, and that’s bad news. (We also had instructions not to fly for the next 18 hours, for exactly the same reason.) Our instructor gave us the rule of thumb that we shouldn’t ascend faster than our bubbles. You’ve probably never noticed, but air bubbles rise very slowly underwater. At one point, I was a few feet directly above Liz and the instructor (mostly because I had trouble adjusting my buoyancy; at least I got a picture of them while I was above them.) It was very interesting watching the large bubbles rise past me – they’re basically round on top, as if you sliced off the top of a marble. The top surface of the bubbles is remarkably shiny and smooth. (Optics aside: if the refractive index of water is 1.33, then the top surface power reflectivity of a bubble is 2%, or about half that of a glass/air interface. Still looks mighty shiny if you’re underwater, though.)

We stayed down until my air ran low, then we surfaced. Overall, we spent 44 minutes underwater and dove to a depth of 26 feet. Then we made our way to shallow water, took off our fins, and walked out of the water. Since we divers look cool to the swimmers on the beach, we had instructions to take wide strides as we walked back up to the showers, so that we didn’t topple over and suffer the ridicule of the entire beach. Then out of the wetsuit and towel off.

Really, scuba diving was quite an experience. Far less expensive than most of the other activities we did, and way more thrilling. I think Liz may be hooked for life…

The next day, we went snorkeling, which was pretty lame compared to scuba diving.

We also went whale watching, where you buy a ticket on a good-sized boat that seats about 50, and you go tooling around in the ocean looking for whales. The boats aren’t allowed to get within 100 yards of the whales, so it’s mostly people looking off the side of the boat and going “ooh!” I know it sounds like it could be the lamest activity ever, but we lucked out.

Typically, during one two-hour whale watching trip, you’ll see maybe one or two “breaches,” where the whale surfaces and gets his/her whole body out of the water. The rest of the time, you’re looking overboard for some kind of whale activity – either a splash, or a little blow spout (of “thar she blows” fame.) But not us! It was non-stop breaches for nearly the whole trip. It must have been the exact right time of year, because there were plenty of mother whales swimming with their calves (as baby whale are known) and teaching them tricks like slapping their fins on the surface and “breaching.” If a typical number of breaches is 2, we probably had over 50. Liz actually got some decent pictures, which is very tricky on a moving boat for such a fleeting target. Maybe it was our calls of “Here, whaley whaley whaley!”

A few days later, we took a drive toward the northwest edge of Maui, naturally stopping where the book recom-mended for pictures. We found this natural structure called a “blowhole,” which made for some terrific pictures. The waves come in, they must go through some submerged structure that channels the wave energy and directs it upward, because when a wave comes in it goes kablooey and shoots water everywhere. Never seen anything like it.

Later on in that drive, we were checking out the view from the top of a cliff, when two guys next to us asked us if we’d seen the whales. “WHAAAAAAAT?” Apparently, the two large black objects in the ocean to our left were not rocks, as we’d thought, but whales! We looked over, and whaddya know, they were moving! Wow! A mother and her calf! We watched them for a few minutes and took pictures. Then the same two guys asked us if we’d like to use their binoculars. “WHAAAAAAAT?” Of course we would! What a tremendous sight! You could see their faces! We looked and gaped, then gave the binoculars back. Overall, we must have watched the same whale pair for 15 or 20 minutes, from our vantage point high above the ocean. You don’t see THAT every day.

We ran out of deodorant while we were there. After realizing that sunblock is not an adequate substitute for deodorant, we hit the drugstore and bought the cheapest deodorant they had: Ban Invisible Solid – “Intensely Fresh” formula. Not only was it cheap, but it provided “24 hrs of unstoppable freshness,” according to the package. Wow! My freshness is totally unstoppable! Like our friend Dangerman once said, “You can’t stop the freshness.”

The food on Maui wasn’t as much fun or as good as on Kauai, with only a few notable exceptions. We found an interesting take-out place that had menu items that spanned Chinese, Italian and Japanese cuisines, with all being pretty good. We found another cool place called “Soup Nutz and Java Jazz,” which was a coffee place that served good food all day and featured live musicians at night. Pretty neat! The rest of our meals on Maui weren’t bad, but they didn’t have the hole-in-the-wall, known-only-to-locals thrill of “Mark’s Place” on Kauai. For our last meal on Maui, we ate at Sarento’s, a fancy place with an ocean view (even at night), and a 28-page wine list. Tasty, but out of my league. At the other end of the spectrum, we also ate at a dingy diner called “Tasty Crust” that makes the best pancakes on the island. Now THAT’s more my speed!

Even farther down the other end of the spectrum, we also got a shave ice at a particular laundromat in central Maui. Do as the locals do, right? Clean clothes AND shave ice. It’s far and away the most local thing we did. There were no tables inside (it’s a laundromat – why would you have tables in these except to fold your clothes?) We made the huge mistake of eating it inside the car. Oh, what a mess…

The weather cooperated magnificently during the whole trip, except for the last two days when it rained with unusually high winds. We had to cancel our introductory surfing lesson, due to insanely high winds that actually knocked out power on some of the other islands. That actually worked out just fine because by then, we were pooped and didn’t really feel up to any more planned activities. It’s probably good that we saw some crummy weather at the end, so that we’d appreciate the great weather we’d had for the 10 days up to that point.

Liz joked that she should have been able to go surfing anyway. I told her my cartoonish vision of what would happen if she tried to go surfing in those winds: First, she’d gently place her big toe in the water. Then the ocean would grab her and instantly fling her off to the horizon. She’d be gone for about ten seconds. Then, the ocean would bring her rushing back from the horizon and dump her on the beach with a thud. Of course, when she came back she’d be covered with stickers from various countries all over the world, just like luggage.

Come to think of it, we were witnesses to three big events that made the local papers. Maybe it was us who caused the bus accident, set fire to the mountain, and caused immense wind damage!

The flights to and from were uneventful. It would have been nice to sleep on them, but that didn’t work out. Can you believe that Northwest has an 8-hour flight connecting Minneapolis and Honolulu, and doesn’t serve any food on it?

So we’re back in Minneapolis, and almost back on Minneapolis time. We’re right in the middle of the coldest spell in three years, and this morning it was -15°F (-26°C) with a wind chill of -40°F (-40°C.) Ah, good to be home!

Stay warm!

Ron and Liz Gerber