Ron's Big Life Update - July 2007

Hi, all.

I’m sure many of you were expecting this a little earlier. After all, it’s been five months since the last Big Life Update. Why the delay? Since the last one had all the details about our giant honeymoon in Hawaii, it would be tempting to say that I needed time to put together a worthy follow-up. Perhaps along the lines of Michael Jackson following up “Thriller”, Quentin Tarantino following up “Pulp Fiction”, or Milli Vanilli following up the “Girl You Know It’s True” album. But that would be just a wee bit inaccurate. For starters, I’m no Jacko, Q, or Vanilli. Although the last Big Life Update was time-consuming to write, I don’t think it qualifies as High Art by any stretch of the imagination. More importantly, I’ve just been content to rest on my laurels. For the last five months, whenever anybody asked what’s new with me, I’d answer that I got married and spent two weeks in Hawaii. Apparently, I can only milk that for five months. It’s back to reality for me…

It’s been a pleasant few months for Liz and me. Since we got the thank-you notes written, it’s really been business as usual for us. All the big things in our life are pretty much the same. Her condo is still on the market (10 months and counting), and all her furniture is still over there. The cats are still being cute and hitting each other in the head. I’m still at my little law firm, and Liz is still at the VA. Cars still working just fine. Nope, nothing big, just a few little things…

March – My cable modem service provider got gobbled up in some kind of corporate merger takeover thing. And so, my terrific RoadRunner service from Time-Warner morphed into the dreaded Comcast service. They raised my rates and restructured the fee structure, so that by signing up for basic cable TV, I actually reduced my bill by $1 every month. So we now have super clear reception on all our local channels, plus TBS (Yay! Atlanta Braves baseball and extra-crappy movies!) and CNN. Competition is good, but unfortunately for me, my suburb doesn’t have any.

February – I’d written before that my cell phone would occasionally get confused, with its main screen suddenly showing a left/right reversal. The reversal would disappear when I open and close the phone, as if nothing was wrong. Well, I finally got some pictures of it, including some with my phone next to Liz’s phone for comparison. Still don’t understand it, but I’m glad I got pictures of it because it hasn’t done it since.
March – I noticed that one of my headlights burnt out, so I had it replaced. Three (3) days later, the other one burnt out, so I had that one replaced as well. Toyota must have some really tight tolerances on their light bulbs!

March – Some of you may know that I’m a member of OSA, the Optical Society of America. We have monthly meetings during the academic year, and there’s always a speaker at the meeting. Last year, one of our speakers talked about a project he was working on, which was an interferometer that was about the size of a beer can. Good talk.

Well, that must have struck a chord with me, because I had a dream about the optics of actual beer cans! It was all right there in the dream in amazing detail, and even included some math. I woke up laughing, and scribbled down as much as I could remember. I’ve written up a tiny portion of my absurd dream, which even includes some relevant math (!), and I tacked it on at the end of this Big Life Update as an Appendix. The proof is left to the reader.

Early April – Saw “Pan’s Labyrinth”, the best kid’s-movie-that’s-not-for-kids I think I’ve ever seen. Can’t say enough good things about it, except that it’s definitely not for kids.

Mid-April – Played plumber and repaired a few of the sinks in the house. The bathroom sink was dripping and the kitchen sink needed a new sprayer, so I got to work.

I learned that one should not buy a cheap Home Depot house brand bathroom faucet, as Margaret had done, because it will eventually drip. You can’t fix it, because it doesn’t contain any user serviceable parts inside. You have to replace it, which is what I did. Not a difficult job by any means, but one that could have been avoided if Margaret had spent more than $29 on the old faucet to begin with.

The sprayer was also pretty straightforward, but involved lying on my back under the kitchen sink for significant amounts of time. The cats thought that was very interesting. At one point, Liz came into the kitchen to find me on my back working under the sink, and Noodge lying next to me on the kitchen floor, also lying on HIS back with his front feet straight up, like HE was working. She said it was the cutest thing ever, but we didn’t get any pictures.

April – Liz’s glasses broke. The plastic frames were four or five years old, and they just broke in half at the nosepiece. She taped them back together at work and was able to finish the workday with them, but they looked mighty nerdy with tape holding them together.

So we went to the mall that night, and hesitantly picked out a pair of frames at Lenscrafters. They weren’t exactly ugly, but she wasn’t thrilled about them. I think what sold her on them was a complete 100% satisfaction-guaranteed refund policy, where she could get all her money back, no questions asked, within 30 days if she didn’t like them.

That night, she tried wearing them but they gave her a headache. Plus, the sides of the frames block some of her peripheral vision, making her feel like she was wearing blinders. The next day, we brought them back. While we were returning them, I figured out that they used her contact lens prescription to make her glasses; you can’t do that. You need slightly different powers, depending on whether your eye correction is a contact lens in contact with your cornea, or is in the form of glasses, which are separated from your cornea by around 14 mm. Now you know. So we got our money back, which was part of their deal.

Then, we went to another vision place in the mall, and it turned out to be a keeper. The place was called “Visionary Optical”, and when we told the guy that Liz’s frames fell apart, he mentioned that he could probably fit the existing lenses to a new frame. In fact, he had a pair of frames right… here! And he popped Liz’s old lenses into a dark-red version of her old frames. For the new frames, he charged us a mere $50, which is WAY less than anything else we looked at. So we spent practically nothing to keep Liz’s good lenses, and Liz is walking around with glasses that look exactly like her old ones, which are very cute. And we’re spreading the word about “Visionary Optical” – there’s one in Southdale, one in Uptown and one in Plymouth. They are truly unlike any vision place I’ve ever seen, and I wholeheartedly recommend them.

Late April – As I was getting into the elevator at my office building, a guy in the elevator asked me if anyone had ever told me that I look just like Joe Satriani? Joe Satriani is the rockin’-est guitarist ever (and it’s hard to believe that the “Surfing With The Alien” album is 20 years old), and he, too, shaved his head a few years back. So I told the elevator guy that that was the coolest thing anybody had said to me all day. And if I could play half as well as Satch, then my life would be very good indeed!

Early May – Got the ducts cleaned in my house. It was the first time I had that done since I moved in 10 years ago, and it had probably been 15 years or so since it had been done. I hired a little mom and pop outfit, and cleaning ducts is all they do. The whole company is just the two of them, which is pretty cool.

They backed their van up in our driveway near the side door, then attached one end of a gigantic flexible tube to the intake portion of the ductwork right next to our furnace. The other end of the tube was hooked up to a huge compressor in the van, and its job was to suck everything out of the ductwork. For each duct, the guy fed a high-pressure air hose down, and blew all the junk toward the furnace and the huge vacuum tube attached to the ducts.

It went fairly smoothly, and took about an hour. They showed me a small portion of the crud that they cleaned out, and there was plenty. They could tell that I had pets, which is no surprise. They could also tell that nobody had been smoking in the house, and it was nice to know the previous owners hadn’t smoked either.

Early May – Bought Liz a bike for her birthday, albeit two months early. She and I now have the same model bike, and she can retire the $99 Target bike that she’s been using for the last ten years. We christened it with a 26-mile ride all over town, which ended with a stop for ice cream. I don’t know what it is about bike rides, but they always involve ice cream.

May – Played paintball with a bunch of friends here in town. Learned that I’m a really bad shot. (I couldn’t hit the side of a barn if someone picked me up and threw me into the side of the barn.) Liz, on the other hand, was a wild woman on the course, and kept shooting people in the face. (Unintentionally, she says, but I’m not convinced.) We all wore masks, and the face shots just left big paint blotches on the screen – no severe injuries. Liz did manage to hit me in the left hand, and actually shot my wedding ring. Not sure what that means.

And also learned that I don’t like getting shot at. I guess that’s not surprising, but it adds just a little more to the mountain of respect that I have for police officers and soldiers. Not cool getting shot at. Glad that doesn’t happen much in my line of work…

Late May – Had a really brief trip out east to see family in New York and Washington, DC. We flew into and out of Newark, NJ, and drove the rental car all over. New York and DC are much farther apart than I remembered, and I won’t be doing that again anytime soon.

Right after we flew into Newark, we drove into Manhattan. New York has apparently replaced all the coin-operated parking meters with a centralized system that takes credit cards, which was surprising, but was pretty easy to use. We decided to be all artsy this visit and went to the Museum of Modern Art. Liz hadn’t been there since they remodeled the building and I don’t think I’d even been there, so it was a fine choice. Plus, Liz just happened to have a credit card from some particular bank that allowed us to get in free! Woo-hoo! Free art! I enjoyed the MOMA; I got to feel much more cultured than I do at home. Liz took my picture standing next to Picasso’s “Three Musicians,” filling my cubist quota for the whole year. And I got Liz’s picture with Elvis, making my “El-Vis with Elvis” picture worthy of inclusion in the museum itself. Maybe if I call it “Two Elvi”…

Did you know the MOMA has an actual exhibit for the Helvetica font? It’s 50+ years old and still going strong. Arial, in contrast, was commissioned by Microsoft to be a knock-off of Helvetica, so that Microsoft wouldn’t have to pay to license Helvetica. Ugly, ugly Arial…

In Manhattan, the only things we ate were from vendors on the street. Pieces of fruit, including the best peach Liz ever tasted, pretzels, a hot dog, a meat-kebab or two, and an ice cream sundae. I think I might have had a slice of pizza and an éclair, too, but I don’t think those were from street vendors.

While in Manhattan, we wanted to do something you can only do in New York – go to a Broadway show. I didn’t want to see anything based on the music of Abba. Or Billy Joel. Or Monty Python. Or Winger. (I don’t think that one exists, actually.) Or anything based on a movie, like Legally Blonde, or even worse, on a Disney movie, like the Lion King. Which ruled out most of the shows playing at the time. I chose to see “Rent”, because it began life as a play before being turned into a movie. Not sure that was my smartest choice ever. “Rent” had an excellent production value, uniformly great singers and a few good songs, but lacked any substantive narrative thread. Enjoyable, but I don’t think we’d see it again or recommend it to anyone.

Times Square is pretty disappointing, actually. I don’t know what it was like in the ‘70s and ‘80s, but nowadays it’s clean but commercial. Chain restaurants and so forth. Worth seeing once, but not really worth returning to.

To head out of Manhattan to mom’s house, I drove up Broadway so Liz could see something north of the Met. We drove past Tom’s Restaurant at Broadway and 112th Street, which was made famous by “Seinfeld”. Didn’t get to eat there, though, because it was after midnight and they were closed. The drive home was marred by a sobriety check on the Saw Mill River Parkway in Westchester County, which dropped traffic down to one lane and added a full hour to our drive. And yes, it turns out that I was indeed sober.

Got to see family in Rockland County, which was nice. My brother has a condo in Suffern, which is at the westernmost corner of Rockland County and looks nothing at all like its portrayal in “Sex In The City”. (No, it’s not Sufferin’.)

Then drove down to DC to see my aunt & uncle, my cousin, and Grandma (the same Grandma with the house in Florida that got damaged by Hurricane Wilma.) What a great city to visit! My cousin lives literally one block from a Metro stop, so once we parked the car in front of her house, we didn’t drive again until we left town.

We spent one day just seeing museums. We spent almost four hours in the Holocaust Museum, and I made it a point to read every single caption while we were there. Then off to the Museum of Natural History, because them dinosaur bones never get old. Got a great picture of Liz with the Hope Diamond. It’s good to hope…

Next day, we spent the whole day seeing monuments. Initially, we wanted to get a tour of the Capitol Building, so we followed the instructions to go to the office of one of our representatives (hello, staff of Keith Ellison!) to get a pass. But there were way too many people in line to actually get the tour, so we hung on to our passes, and we’ll use them next time we’re in town.

We walked from the Capitol to the White House, about two miles even though it seems really short on the map, then to the Washington Monument. This is my illustration of the Washington Monument:It’s very tall.

We didn’t have tickets to go inside, so initially, when we walked up to the base of the monument, we sat down on the benches and took a few pictures. After a minute or two, a guard came around and asked if everyone there had tickets. When we said no, he told us “Shh! Don’t say anything and go with those people.” And in short order, we were on the tour!

The Washington Monument is very tall. Very extremely tall. I’ve been in taller buildings, but this one is the tallest in the DC area and you can see for miles in all directions. The observation room is 500 ft up, and the tippy top of the peak is 555 ft and 5.5 inches. Nice! This is probably the reason that the US never embraced the metric system, because 169.294 meters doesn’t have the same ring.

We took pictures from the top, facing the east, north, west and south. It’s very cool, and I heartily recommend the Washington Monument to anyone who visits DC.

Then walked to the Lincoln Memorial. A park ranger gives a short talk at the Memorial a few times a day, and we caught the last one of the day. The crowd listening to him was very small, and I tried to think of unusual questions to ask him. Does the sculpture go all the way around to the back? His hair does indeed go all the way around to the back, but the rest of the sculpture is pretty much featureless on the back side.

We did a bunch more walking and saw more monuments, but you can read about those in books. (That's Ron with his arms spread at the Jefferson Memorial.)

We stayed a few days with my cousin, Heidi, in her house in Arlington. She moved in a few years ago and I hadn’t seen the place until now. Great old house, plenty of charm, cool location, and easily-identifiable by its super-bright-red door. We came back home, thinking, “Why can’t our house be that cool?”

In DC, we also saw my aunt Amy and uncle Arthur. Arthur has worked for years for the insurance industry in DC, and has quite a respectable reputation there. When Bob Dole ran for president, I think uncle Arthur was his health advisor. Extremely knowledgeable about health care and the health insurance industry, probably more so than anyone else I’ve encountered. So I probably shouldn’t have been surprised when I saw a TV ad for Michael Moore’s film about the health insurance industry, “Sicko”, with a quickie clip of uncle Arthur walking out of a building. I believe Liz and I said to each other, “That’s uncle Arthur!” It certainly looked like him, and it would make sense that he’d be somewhere in the movie. But the TV ad? We kept watching until they showed the ad again. Yup – unmistakable. We haven’t seen the movie yet, but I understand that Arthur is not a big fan of Michael Moore…

We also saw Grandma’s apartment in DC. She’d been there for a year and a half, but I hadn’t seen her or her new place since I cleaned out the old one in Florida. Nice little apartment in an assisted-living complex. Two meals a day, doctor on premises, bankers and hair stylists that come by regularly – a really nice place. And Grandma seems to really like it. She’s surrounded by people to interact with, which is a welcome change from the last few years she was down in Florida. I hope I end up in a place like that when the time comes.

Early June – DJed a wedding for my friend Jill’s sister. Very nice party. They rented out the Wabasha Street Caves, which was originally an underground nightclub in the ‘30s. It was built inside a series of caves, and it was very cool. Kinda clammy, too, even though they have dehumidifiers cranked up non-stop. The food was from Cosetta’s, a terrific Italian restaurant here in town.

Musically, the wedding started off like all my other parties. But once the older folks left, the young folks, including the bride and groom, wanted some recent dance music. And I started to sweat just a little bit; I don’t have a very high opinion of recent dance music, even though I have all of it. I did a 45-minute set of stuff I used to play in my mid-‘90s club days, and it totally killed! Who’da thought that “Rump Shaker” and “Jump Around” would make a comeback? And someone actually requested “Ice Ice Baby”. After I burned through everything I could remember from the mid-‘90s, I crossed my fingers and hauled out the recent stuff. Turns out that I shouldn’t have worried; drunk 20-somethings will dance to pretty much anything they’ve heard on the radio, so I gave them a buncha hits and a good time was had by all. Really good party, actually.

Mid-June – Found out that Liz got into grad school! YAY! She’ll be starting in May, 2008 at St. Mary’s here in Minneapolis, and she’ll be getting a master’s in Nurse Anesthesia. When she’ll be finished in about two years, she’ll be a Nurse Anesthetist. When they have to knock you out, she’ll be the one administering the anesthesia, telling you to breathe deeply and count backwards from 100 by sevens. Note that an Anesthesiologist does essentially the same job but has an MD. She doesn’t need to go to medical school to be a Nurse Anesthetist, which is a relief.

Mid-June – Liz got an aquarium for her betta fish. It’s a rectangular 11-gallon tank, and we put it in our TV room underneath the TV. The TV is on the top of the stand, and the tank is within the stand, so it’s not as electrically dangerous as the picture you have in your head right now.

The tank has a filter and a light on a timer, and it looks really nice. She planted some plants on the bottom of the tank and a put a little thermometer on the side, but the fish seemed intent on bustin’ the place up and knocked loose the thermometer and a few plants. So the thermometer and a few plants just float around on the top of the tank, and that’s that. The cats show surprisingly little interest in the fish, which I guess is good.

Initially, Liz bought a few gallons of water that was specially prepared by the fish store, with proper pH and all that. The next time she went in, she talked to the guy about water, and he asked her what part of town she lives in. She answered, Richfield, our little first-ring suburb just south of Minneapolis proper. The guy then told her that Richfield tap water is just perfect for the kind of fresh water tank she was putting together. No extra filtering, no pH adjustment, nothing. Just out of the tap and it’s perfect. The guy told Liz that that’s why virtually all the fish stores in town are located in Richfield, which we had noticed before but hadn’t fully understood. Until now.

Late June – A friend of mine gave us tickets to see a production of “Barbarella” as done by a local tongue-in-cheek dance troupe, “Ballet Of The Dolls”. That’s the very same “Barbarella” as the Jane Fonda movie from 1968, a science fiction classic that came out the same year as “2001: A Space Odyssey”. Except that the movie “Barbarella” is laughably awful.

And wouldn’t you know, the ballet production of it was terrific! WAY more enjoyable than “Rent”…

Late June – I’m on the program committee of my radio station, KFAI, and we’ve been working on some changes to the schedule. The last time anyone tried changing the schedule was, like, 13 years ago, and there are some station members that still grumble about it, so we knew we would have to makes these changes carefully.

We solicited proposals for about 13 slots, and received about 60 submissions. So over the course of June, the other program committee members and I all listened to all 60 submissions. For me, it took up nearly every weekend in June. The new schedule is great, but I can’t bring myself to listen to any more KFAI shows yet…

Late June – We saw the movie “Waitress”, then sneaked into an adjacent theater to see “Knocked Up”. Two excellent movies, both of which I heartily recommend. The last time we did this, we saw “Sideways”, then sneaked into “The Incredibles”, which may very well stand as the greatest double feature in movie history.

Actually, both “Waitress” and “Knocked Up” are remarkably similar. Both show how getting pregnant unexpectedly can really screw up your existing life. Both feature casts that are made up almost entirely of TV people rather than movie people. “Knocked Up” has a bunch of people from “The Office” and nearly the entire cast of “Freaks And Geeks”; “Waitress” has that girl from “Felicity”, that woman from “Curb Your Enthusiam” and that guy from “The Andy Griffith Show”(!) And, surprisingly, both come to the same moral conclusion, which I won’t give away because you should really see these films.

Late June – Liz and I took our annual camping trip. We met on this camping trip three years ago, so this was our fourth trip together. This year, we went to a campsite south of Rochester, MN, which was MUCH closer than the Wisconsin trip we’d done in years past. The weather cooperated spectacularly, and we had a great weekend.

The campsite was pretty nice, and they had a list of rules to make sure that it stayed nice. A printed list of rules. 18 rules, to be precise, several of which included fines if they were broken. So that became the running joke for the weekend – a $25 fine for whatever little thing we were talking about.

On the drive down, we were behind the same car for about 100 miles, and this car had the license plate “MOLISSA”. Molissa? What kind of name is Molissa? Actually, it’s fun to say: Mo-Lissa. Try it! It just flows off the tongue, especially if you stretch out the MO to a few seconds. Moooooooooo-lissa.

The day before we got there, there was some heavy rain upstream from us, and the river was too high for canoeing. It wasn’t just us – they also wouldn’t let a particular group’s 26th annual canoe trip on the river. So we drove into town and all rented bikes. Liz and I got a side-by-side tandem bike, which was two independent bikes that were latched together to ensure that we steered in the same direction. It was a fun ride, but the bike weighed easily over 100 pounds, and any uphill pedaling was brutality for us. We rode down a paved trail into the next town for pie. Mmm pie. Apparently, we’re not the only ones who do that; the business cards of the “Aroma Pie Shop” give their address as “on the bike trail, Whalan, Minnesota”. Then we rode back. The next day, we were able to go tubing down the river, which is more my speed than actual canoeing anyway, then showered and drove home. There is a spectacular barbeque place in Rochester, MN called John Hardee’s, and Liz and I stopped there twice to eat, once on the way there and once on the way home. Mmm meat.

Early July – In a moment of weakness at Sam’s Club, I bought a 3-pack of some sugary Kellogg’s cereals. One bag each of Lucky Charms, Cocoa Puffs, and Trix. The box was boasting that Trix had an exciting new shape: “round”. Since when does “round” qualify as a “new shape”? I would think that “round” would have been around since the invention of cereal itself, but apparently, “round” is the hip new shape that all the young kids dig nowadays. Those wacky kids with their “round”…

Mid-July – Arranged a low-key surprise party for Liz’s birthday. After she was done with work, I told her to get dressed so we could go out. She figured out that we were going out to dinner, and she even figured out where (oooh! El Meson!), but boy was she surprised to find people she knows in the restaurant! Hey! What are you guys doing here? So we had a table for eight, rather than just us two, and a good time was had by all.

Late July – Saw “The Simpsons Movie”. Along with the rest of America. For opening night (July 27th), which was a Friday, I did 90 minutes of Simpsons-related stuff on “Crap From The Past”.

Hope your summer is going well!

Ron & Liz Gerber
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Appendix – Ron’s Crazy Dream: The Optics Of Actual Beer Cans

Actual beer cans make rather terrible optical elements, as best as I can tell.

For instance, let’s consider a beer can used as a laser cavity.

We can apply the mathematics of laser resonators to top and bottom surfaces of the beer can. We’ll assume that the top of the can is flat (R1 = infinity), the bottom of the can is convex with a radius of about 30 mm (R2 = 30 mm), and that the on-axis separation between the top and bottom is about 100 mm (L = 100 mm). We can calculate the g parameters (= 1 – L/R) of each surface (g1 = 1, g2 = -7/3), note that their product does not fall between 0 and 1, and conclude that the inside of a beer can would be an unstable resonator.

We can do similar analysis of a beer can used as a waveguide. It’s a pretty terrible waveguide.

We’ll consider the waveguide to be cylindrical with a diameter of 3.25 inches, with a refractive index of about 1.33 (beer is mostly water, Bud Light especially so) if full and 1 if empty, with aluminum walls with a refractive index of 2 – 7i. There’s a bunch of math involved, which says basically that because the diameter (3.25 inches) is so much larger than the wavelength (550 nm for green light), there would be an awful lot of high-order transverse modes. Not really a good thing.

We can analyze a beer can used as a pinhole camera. It’s not a very good pinhole camera.

Pinhole cameras have a film plane a particular distance back from a pinhole, and the theory is that every ray leaving the object and reaching the film plane passes through the same (x,y,z) location of the hole. Exposure times can be really long, because there’s not a lot of light getting through a pinhole. For a pinhole camera to work well, the hole should be small and round, two things that the beer can tabs are not. A rule of thumb for the size of the pinhole diameter is 1.9 times sqrt (hole-to-film distance length times wavelength). For a green wavelength of 550 nm and a top-to-bottom distance of 120 mm (assuming the bottom is flat, even thought it’s really not), the pinhole diameter should be about 0.5 mm. Based on my casual measurements on a Sierra Mist can that I found in the fridge at work, the can tab is roughly elliptical with major and minor axes of about 24 mm and 16 mm. I don’t remember if beer cans have the extra-wide drinking tabs that sodey pop cans have, but I’m fairly certain that they’re larger than 0.5 mm. Bad news for the pinhole camera!

If you were to put a lens on the top surface of the can, with a 5-inch focal length and a 2-inch diameter, and attach a detector to the bottom of the can, you’d have an odd detection system, which would have an effective numerical aperture of 0.1 along one direction and about 0.07 along the other. Plus, there would be a constant phase shift across the detector, caused because the drinking tab is located off-center (or else it would be hard to drink from!)

We can analyze a beer can used as an integrating sphere, if we attach a detector to the bottom of the can and allow light to enter the top of the can through the drinking tab. Basically, a terrible integrating sphere because the inside of the can is smooth, and you’d want a roughened surface on the inside of the integrating sphere for scattering light.

And so forth! I think that for virtually any optics application you can think of, a beer can does it badly. Mind you, this all came to me in a dream! And I don’t even like beer!

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