Monday, December 20, 2010

Tropical Storm Omeka

Our Saturday travel - which took as long as going from San Francisco to London in the end - rather knocked us out. We got lost a couple of times driving to the rental house as it was dark and the freeways around Honolulu make Spaghetti Junction look like a neat grid system. At one pointers found ourselves heading into the Pearl Harbor Naval Base. Taking evasive action, we ended up driving into the entrance of the Airforce base instead. The security lady was very nice and let us do a u-turn in the drive. I guess they must get that all the time....

Our house is fairly nice, though not as plush as some we've rented on other islands. To be fair, we only booked in September, and this is apparently the busiest week of the year in Hawai'i for tourists visiting, so I think we have to count ourselves lucky we got anything decent. Not thing we discovered early on was that the roof leaked in two places. And the way we discovered that? Tropical storm Omeka, of course.

Just as we got to Kailua, the town in which we are staying, the skies opened with the most dramatic downpour. We always say that when it rains in California, it really rains; but it has nothing on the rain we saw on Saturday night and Sunday. It seems that Tropical Storm Omeka is "an unusual December storm" (according to the University of Hawaii meteorological department); one that will not hit Hawai'i with any destructive force, but which brings a lot of rain to islands.

The rain beat down hard all Saturday night, waking us up several times. On Sunday, it is thought that ten inches of rain fell during 24 hours. The road at the end of our street (which is called Pilipu Drive, much to Little Starlet's endless amusement)' was awash with puddles several inches deep; and we learned later that flash flood warnings were in effect across the whole island.

Luckily, we were able to amuse ourselves with, first, a trip to the local Big City Diner for breakfast (Dr Mom had Eggs Benedict; Deep Thought has "pancake sandwich" comprising two large pancakes, two eggs, two sausages and two rashers of bacon; Little Startlet had a super sweet short stack of macadamia pancakes with special sauce; and Hubby had an omelet).

Then we went next door to the Foodland supermarket for our week's grocery, spending over $400 on a medium sized cart load of food! It is easy to forget how expensive Hawai'i is for food.... We rounded off the morning with a game of Life, which Deep Thought won spectacularly without taking the college route. A lesson in modern life, perhaps?

In the afternoon we headed up the coast to Kanahole to the movie theater to see the new Narnia movie, which was pretty good, and highly suitable for a very, very, wet day.

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