Today we had to kill time until we could check into the house. We thought that would give us a great opportunity to swap our rattle-trap Jeep for something more sensible, but apparently there are NO OTHER VEHICLES on the entire island. I spent a bit of time on the phone today with the manager, and I think he understood that I would not give up and be happy with my Jeep. We got a discount and our REAL car should be delivered to us first thing in the morning. Cross your fingers!
Whoo! This is a long one...
Here's what I learned today: getting up at 8:30am is really easy when you went to bed at 10:30pm, which was really 1:30am and you're actually getting up at 11:30am. Oh, time zones!
We didn't have much planned for today, so we drove north and had a perfectly satisfactory lunch at Calypso in Hanalei. Last time we were here it was called Zelo's (treasure that shirt, Marc, because they are no more) and I think the food was a little bit better, but the Mai Tais are still just fine!
We had planned to rent snorkel gear from the same sleepy little surf shop in Hanalei as we did last time, but we were, um, wrong. Prices have skyrocketed from $7/week to $20/week, and they couldn't give us a break for a month... so we ended up buying gear instead. Matt says we'll get plenty of use out of it back home (nobody tell him I don't go in the water because it's too cold).
We finally got into the house at 3pm. It is amazing! (It's also for sale, but WAY too expensive, so I swear we're not buying it). We unpacked, set up, got changed and went to the beach. There is a path literally across the street from our house, that is literally 50 steps long, and there's the beach. We tested our snorkel gear until I got a little water-freaked-out, then I sat on the beach reading while Matt played. It was lovely!
It gets dark here early, so we just went to the grocery store and now we're going to laze around the house. I swear this blog was going to include pictures, but I haven't actually taken any yet, so I'll get back to you on that.
Oh, yeah, and no cell service at the house! We get plenty of signal elsewhere on the island, so you can leave a message, but we brought our home (VoIP) phone with us, so that number will work too.