More rain

More rain over night and this morning. More thunder too. We threatened to take the girls on a four mile ridge walk followed by a trip to the Pearl Harbor war memorial, but they rapidly worked out that we didn't really mean it....

A Simple Beach Day

We were supposed to head out at 6:30am across the island to pick up a whale watching tour, but when we woke at 5:45am there was a thunder storm going on outside. After five minutes thought, we all headed back to bed. This turned out to be the right choice, as we received a call from the tour people at 7:30 am - when the boat Was supposed to leave harbor - saying it had been cancelled.

The rain came down, often as hard as it had at the start of our vacation. Eventually we tired of looking through the window at it and decided to head down to the beach anyway. Hubby and the kids went into the water, while Dr Mom sat in a beach chair, under a black umbrella, reading the third Harry Potter book. All pretty standard mad English behavior.

After lunch, we played another game of Life, which Deep Thought won yet again - demonstrating for the second time that the most important thing in life to do is become a lawyer - then we went out for cake and coffee. The afternoon ended with a viewing of "Finding Nemo". A much quieter day after our recent adventures.

We might go to Pearl Harbor tomorrow, but then again we may stay in bed late and roll out onto the beach again....

"It's wiggling its legs!"

This morning we were supposed to be going over to the west coast of the island to take a whale watching boat trip; but overnight we experienced a massive rainstorm with lightning, still in progress first thing this morning, so we abandoned that idea. Fortunately the trip organizers came to the same conclusion and cancelled the event, so we will get our money back.

I got up at 8:30am to the smell of bacon cooking - Dad making sandwiches - and the sound of small girl screaming. Little Starlet had discovered a large (big as a man's thumb) cockroach on the kitchen floor, on its back, still waving its legs. I subsequently discovered a second beastie next to the tumble drier, also waving. After much screaming and ewwwwwing, the two beasties were dispatched out the back door by brave Dad with the help of a very large glass.

It is still monsoon raining as I write. No plans for today, then.

A Day at Home

Hubby and the girls headed off to the other side of the island for a snorkeling adventure, which I'll leave him to describe. I stayed at home, having no wish to be tossed around on a small boat or to make my own entertainment for five hours. Luckily the weather today has been glorious. First I walked into the center of Kailua, which took about 30 minutes, to find the bookstore, coffee shop, drug store, and Foodland. Having drunk my latte and chowed down my cake, I returned to the house laden with a new book for me, second hand books for the kids, bread for lunch, chocolate, hair conditioner - Little Starlet washed her hair three times yesterday - and an all important tube of anti-itch cream for bug bites.

After lunch on the lanai, I took my book and lawn chair down to the beach for a happy hour and a half of looking at the sea...until it started to rain again, not heavily, but enough to endanger the integrity of my paperback.

A couple of observations. First, everyone on Oahu seems to own at least one dog, usually a scrappy mutt of indeterminate parentage. Second, there is a serious lack of mailboxes. I've been carrying around a letter to mail since we arrived. And, third, though this house is not directly on the beach, I think it scores highly for being just a couple of minutes away from one of the nicest Hawai'ian beaches we've encountered, all golden sand and calm waves on a gently sloping sea bed. It even gets cleaned every morning.

Tomorrow, a day at the Polynesian Cultural Center. Fingers crossed that the weather has turned in our favor.

Under the Sea Just You and Me...and 62 others

On Monday morning the rain let up a little, so we walked over to our local beach - which happens to be one of the top beach spots on Oahu, Kailua Beach - for a bit of paddling in the sea. We toughed it out for an hour till the weather overcame us. Dr Mom stood in the edge of the waves in her rolled up jeans and green anorak, looking properly British. The other three pranced in and out of the waves, getting steadily wetter and wetter. When the rain started to pour again we retreated to the house to clean up.

At 11:30am, we got in the car and headed over to Honolulu, for the day's adventure: lunch at Benihana's followed by an underwater trip on the Atlantis Submarine. It turned out that we should have left a lot more time to get there. Half an hour turned into an hour in the snarly Honolulu traffic. In fact, our overall impression of Honolulu was of a fairly average looking city with rather more palm trees than usual, terrible traffic, and a lot of hotels. We didn't feel inspired to visit again.

We arrived at Benihana's with only 45 minutes before check in time at the sub; so our leisurely lunch, with chef entertainment, didn't quite come off. In the end we gobbled down our food in about 15 minutes and raced out of the door into the pouring rain. I think our jolly chef didn't quite understand why we weren't more receptive to his jokes (which he clearly thought were pretty funny).

At the pier, we took the Atlantis boat out to the sub loading area, about 10 minutes, on a fairly choppy sea. We looked for whales but didn't see any. At the sub, you climb off the boat onto the deck of the sub, then down a vertical ladder comprising about ten rungs, into the seating area. We were on the sixty-four passenger sub, which has bigger windows. Every passenger gets their own window, pretty much. The Japanese family of five next to Dr Mom began to throw up into their little white bags as soon as they were on board. It was, admittedly, rather bouncy as we waited at the surface. Hubby says he was feeling quite green at this point. Then the sub dived, eventually reaching a depth of 110 feet. We spent 45 minutes working round several artificial reefs - two sunken ships, an airplane, some concrete pyramids, etc. I have to confess to being a little disappointed by what we saw. There was a school of eagle rays that was undeniably impressive, but other than that the fish seemed a bit thin on the ground...or should that be water.... The kids were impressed though.

The Japanese family continued to throw up noisily throughout the voyage, reaching a climax as the sub resurfaced to return us to the boat. At this point, Dr Mom was unable to resist the sensory pressures any more and also had a small, but perfectly contained, barf into a little bag. The trip back to shore was uneventful. We rewarded ourselves for a job well done by having giant ice creams before going back to the car.

Guess what - it was bucketing down with rain again.

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.

Blown Home by the Wind

The wind continued to roar around the van all night. We didn't actually have a lot of trouble getting to sleep - Hubby told us all to think we were on a boat rocking on the waves, which seemed to help some of the family - but the van was cold in the morning from the drafts finding their way through cracks and crevices. That said, we weren't as cold as the two guys who had pitched tent in the site next door after we'd gone to bed. It was a dad and his son and, boy, did they look cold and miserable putting the tent away at 7:00am. It was not a night (or a location) for tent camping.

Everyone got splendidly clean in the campground showers. It was a revelation. Deep Thought had a bit of a problem with her towel and robe becoming soaked because Dad didn't warn her that she had put them on a seat for disabled people in the shower, and not a bench, but apart from that all went swimmingly (if you'll excuse the pun).

We set off promptly for our longest drive, 322 miles north to Merced and the McConnell State Recreation Area.

The kids watched "Guys and Dolls" on the portable DVD player while we drove along I-15 away from Calico, through Barstow - another depressed town going nowhere - and back to Mojave. Our route traversed a stretch of the Mojave Desert. I am glad that I didn't make more effort to find places for us to camp in the Mojave Desert, as we now feel like we've seen enough of it. Dry and flat with a lot of rocks. Impressive for its scale, and the contrast between the desert plain and the mountains, but not a place you'd much want to hang out. Or live. I guess some people choose to, though I'm not sure why... It seems clear from the state of most of the little towns that the young people leave and never return. One day these small towns will fall into the desert like the mining towns that preceded them. Some of them are half way there already. Quite a spooky thought, really.

We backtracked along our earlier route from Mojave through Tehachapi to Bakersfield. The landscape around Tehachapi is appealing, with rolling hills, more greenery, and a winding road that meets and greets the long distance railway in numerous places.

Bakersfield was as lovely as we remembered. This time there were no diversions. We stopped for lunch at the China Town Buffet off I-99 just at the edge of Bakersfield, and it turned out to be just what we needed. Imagine a bland single story building filled with 150 diners of all shapes, sizes, colors, and ages. About 85% of the men have facial hair - something we noticed was a lot more prevalent in the central valley - and everyone has at least three plates of food in front of them. It was a help yourself to everything buffet for $10 each, and we sure did. Little Starlet focused heavily on the meat options. Deep Thought consumed mostly appetizers, though she also tucked into some teriyaki chicken. Hubby ate ribs and shrimps, while I focused on brightly colored food skewered on sticks. It went down very well in all senses.

By the time we'd finished gorging ourselves, the rain had started to fall in Bakersfield. We decided to out run it. The kids armed themselves with "Nanny McPhee", and we set out along the ever-so-slightly-dull I-99.

Reaching Fresno, the rain was really coming down hard. Hubby put forward the crazy idea of abandoning our last night of camping and driving home. We decided to have a family conference in Merced, just short of the McConnell Recreation Area. Fortunately we were able to hold it in a Starbucks! Nectar of the Gods! (Our first sighting of a Starbucks for several days was in Bakersfield, which is how we knew that Bakersfield counted as civilization, and that we'd been experiencing the wilderness before that.)

The vote was taken and the decision made to return home. So that is where I am writing now, in our family room with a cup of tea.