Adventure of the month

Last week was kind of special. For only the second time in my life, I went out on a trip that went full circle around the globe. This means I left Miami on April 1st and headed East towards Europe. I then continued east and then more east (and still more east) until lo and behold, April 9th I was back where I started. In between, there was some sightseeing, plenty of sleeping on airplanes, curry galore and that giddy euphoria that comes from the coupling of seeing a new place and the certainty of oncoming exhaustion. To give an idea of what something like that is like, here is a cliff notes version of my schedule.

With an average rainfall of 18.29 inches per year, it is unlikely that you will get rained out in Honolulu. For comparison's sake, my hometown of Miami clocks in at 58.53. This was repeatedly pointed out to me, a couple of years ago, as I sat indoors watching it pour during the time that I should have been sipping mai tai's on a sunset sail. I had done all of the the research before arriving on the island and had sold about a dozen people on the idea. Based on both their price ($30 including unlimited drinks) and excellent reviews, I had booked all of us aboard the Na Hoku II . On the given day, I had taken "it's only a passing cloud" as my infallible mantra. I may have done an anti-rain dance.  It did no good. In the end, we were all left sodden and minus one dazzling sunset (but not exactly thirsty, luckily, you can still get those mai tai's on land).

The NY Times travel section has a regular feature wherein they pick a destination and then tell you what you could do there within a 36 hour period. Of course, they neglect to mention that you would need to have a late model hovercraft to actually complete their itinerary in the allotted time frame. Either that or you must be willing to zip through a museum as if there was a prize to be collected at the gift shop, Amazing Race-style or limit yourself to no more than 30 minutes for a full sit-down meal (good luck with that in Europe). I, myself, am intimately familiar with the rushed visit. Oftentimes, through a confluence of unfortunate circumstances, I have extremely short stays in places that are worthy of much closer inspection. For a perfect example of this annoying phenomena, I only need to look back to the beginning of this month, when I spent a whopping 16 hours on the unspoiled island of Kauai.

The Pyramids artificial reef Japanese "sculpture" normally used to grow seaweed The depth gauge gauging . Remains of a MidPacifics airplane Sunken ship known only as YO-257 the sunken San Pedro Couldn't ask for a nicer day. Diamond Head volcano as seen from the boat This past Thursday, my flight out of Honolulu did not leave until 3pm, so I had an afternoon and I had a mission. My mission was to do something new in Hawaii, something I had not already done. This simple criteria quickly ruled out climbing Diamond Head (already ruled out my pitiful lack of stamina), visiting Chinatown (already ruled out by my recent bok choy over-saturation), shopping for loud floral wear (already ruled by what I like to consider a semblance of sartorial taste) and trolling the island in search of 99 cent Mai Tais (already ruled out by a hangover from the previous night’s Mai Tai binge). These exclusions and the short time frame available left both myself and th...