Aloha!

Well, all worries aside, we made it! Right now, I’m sitting in our room on the sixth floor of the Hilton Waikoloa Village‘s Lagoon Tower, looking out over Waiulua Bay. Stepping out onto the deck, I can look nearly directly down into the Dolphin Quest pool, where people (with a whole lot more expendable money than we have) are swimming with dolphins. Not long ago, I was snorkeling along through the resort’s lagoon, surrounded by schools of fish, diving down to get a closer look at eels, pufferfish, and parrot fish, and sidling on up to pat a sea turtle’s shell as it nosed through the spray of a waterfall.

We may never stay someplace this ritzy again, but boy is it a treat to be doing it now!

The flights in were actually pretty good. We went from Seattle to Maui, then a short hop to Kona. Both flights were pretty smooth, with just a bit of turbulence here and there, but nothing to really get the heart racing (which is fine by me). The landing in Kona was one of the smoothest I can remember, too — so smooth, in fact, that we didn’t even realize we were landing until the tires hit the runway. Pretty cool!

We picked up our rental car, found the hotel, and checked in around 11pm here…which, of course, was about 2am Seattle time, so we were pretty zonked. The car got handed over to valet parking (we were tired and we’d never done it before, so we figured what the heck), Prairie’s dad L came down to meet us and give us a basic idea of where everyone else was, and then we hid in our room and ordered room service. After some food and a short torchlit walk around the grounds, we crashed.

While we wanted to sleep in this morning, the time zone change bit us and we ended up waking up at around 8am Seattle time…around 5am here. Eventually we admitted that we wouldn’t be falling back asleep, and decided to just get up and start exploring before breakfast. We ran into L outside the room, and the three of us went down to watch the dolphins play in their pool for a bit. A bit more wandering around (during which time we got to feed and pet a sea turtle that was hanging out near the edge of part of the lagoon), and then we met the rest of the wedding party for a breakfast buffet. All of Prairie’s family I knew, all of P’s family I was meeting for the first time — and so, true to form, all their names have already completely vacated my head.

After breakfast, we all went down to the lagoon for some snorkling, one of the things that Prairie and I had both been looking forward to a lot. The lagoon is huge, and we got to see quite a bit of different kinds of fish as we paddled along, eventually tracking down the sea turtles over by the waterfall. After a few minutes we decided to swim back to where everyone else was and grab the underwater disposable camera we’d brought down, then swim back to get some shots of the turtles. I took a couple underwater shots as we were on the way…then about halfway across the lagoon, the toes on my right foot started cramping. As I tried to paddle extra hard with my left foot to keep afloat while grabbing my right foot in pain, my left foot started to cramp up too. This left Prairie to try to collect my flippers (which I’d ended up kicking off) and the camera and try to help maneuver me back to shallow water, and the strain of trying to manage all that made her kick a little oddly and gave her a charlie horse in her leg.

Once back to shallow water, we decided that it was time to call a halt to the day’s snorkling. A bit of a pity, as I only got a few shots off on the underwater camera, but we’d had over an hour of snorkel time, which was far more (and more strenuous) than we’d ever done in the pools at home, which was probably what triggered the cramping. Instead, we spent a few minutes in one of the freshwater pools to rinse some of the salt off, then came back up to our room to shower and rest for a bit.

I’m about to head down to start being “the photographer” for the day’s wedding activities, beginning with H’s hair appointment. There should be a bit of a break after her hair is done, then the wedding is at six this evening, with a reception to follow. Tomorrow morning, we’ll be checking out and heading on to part two of our Hawaii vacation — camping at one of the beaches and hiking around in Volcanoes National Park. I’ll update again if I can (and if I feel like it), but as I doubt there’s much in the way of ‘net access at the campgrounds, we may be back in Seattle before I check in here again.