It was my birthday! It was the best birthday I've had in years.
We actually didn't do very much, because we'd chosen this day to be way more chill than the day before, and it was the last full day we had before we'd have to leave and wanted to enjoy it.
*Before I give my brief account, I know I'm forgetting stuff. We went back to that market an alarming amount of times during our stay. Steve went to the pool, and I went shopping. We ate, but not as often as we probably should have. Honestly, I don't remember which days these things happened, so just imagine those activities crammed into the cracks of all of my other stories.*
We met a cat in the morning on the back porch...ahem, I mean, the lanai. Heehee.
She was a sweet tortoise shell cat that had been caught, fixed (she had a tipped ear,) and released around the resorts. We'd seen several of them during our stay, and this was the second one to make friends with me. I think it was because I was eating cold, fried squid and shared it with her. She wanted love so bad, so I gave her lots. I named her Lilikoi, which is the Hawaiian word for passionfruit and one of the few words I could pronounce. She meowed so sadly when we left for the day. I wanted to cram her in my suitcase and take her home, but you can't even take a mango back from Hawaii, so I didn't think a cat would have made it through the agricultural check. :(
We drove down to Kona, which was the same town we went to for the luau earlier in the week, to visit the farmer's market that happened every morning. We wanted to buy fruit. I don't know why we got as much as we did because we had to leave the next day and couldn't take it with us, but it was too tempting. We got a pineapple, a cocoa bean, some bananas, a weird, scaly thing called a soursop, and a mystery orb that turned out to be a yellow passionfruit. I'd hoped that I could find something to take back to my mother and sister as a souvenir, but most of the booths hadn't opened and the ones that had were mass market stuff that I could have found anywhere else. We walked around Kona for a bit, met a very passionate man who worked for a local coffee company and seemed like he'd had a gallon or two that morning, and we got drinks from a local vendor (mine was passion fruit and I'm now addicted to them) to drink while we sat near the beach. It was a very lovely morning.
The only thing we'd actually planned to do that day, other than the dinner reservations we'd made, was visit a local beach. It wasn't one we'd seen before, and it was very popular that day. Don't be shocked, but I actually wore a swimsuit. In front of strangers. A two piece one! I know! Don't be too excited for me because it didn't fit very well. It was the first time I'd worn the bottom half and it was a shade too big, and the top was a shade too small, but except for my boobs threatening to fall out occasionally, I didn't care a bit. We found a spot to lay our blanket, and I got into the water. Dude, it was cold, but I stayed in until could swim around. Steve stayed on the beach, and I geeked out because I was in Hawaii, swimming in the pacific, on my birthday. I got out and walked along the beach looking for shells, but I really don't think that the island where we were was good for that. I only found two intact shells the whole time we were there, but I found a few pretty broken ones. Then we lay out on the beach for a while just enjoying the day.
After we left, Steve found a place he wanted to visit a few miles away, but I decided to stay back at the condo and take a nap. When he got back we visited the resort pool and hot tub, and it was like a scene from Cocoon. Then I realized that we are also old, and that made me sad! Haha! It was evening by that point, so we got cleaned up to go to dinner, which was, weirdly, at a Hawaiian-Cajun fusion place at the shopping center. Great food; weird combination.
While we were waiting on our dinner time, I wanted to get one particular thing for myself as a souvenir, and that was a necklace. I'd been given some birthday money from Mr. Lee, and I thought a nice piece of jewelry would be a great thing I'd use all the time, and it wouldn't gather dust, but y'all...real jewelry is effing expensive. I didn't want anything elaborate, or made of diamonds, but even the relatively simple stuff I found was WAY out of my price range. I usually just wear a simple, silver necklace with a small pendant on it, and that's all I wanted, but geez. I did finally find one, not exactly what I originally wanted, but close enough. It's a tiny, silver hibiscus flower on a chain. It's pretty rad.
We had to go back and start organizing our stuff so that we could leave the next day and I was sad. I know how cliche this sounds, but I genuinely didn't want to leave. I know that a lot of people feel like that, and they move to Hawaii for the vibes and then realize that living in Hawaii isn't the same as vacationing there, but I literally could have abandoned everything and stayed. That sounds so dumb. There was something about being there, on that island I hadn't prepared to visit and didn't know anything about until driving around it, that has my heart now. I genuinely miss it. Not the food, not the touristy stuff, but the place.
But leave it I must. It is the way of things.
The next morning (Sunday) we got everything packed away, snarfed an obscene of farmer's market fruit, and played with the cat for a while. Three kids came up while we were outside and I introduced them to the cat, so I know she had some playmates after we left which made me feel better about leaving her there. After checking out, we returned the rental car and sat at the first of three airports for a really long day of travel. Our first flight wasn't until that afternoon, but our check out time was in the morning, so we sat in the Kona airport for several hours before a short flight to Honolulu. From there we got on a long-ass, 8 hour, overnight flight to Atlanta. I took a sleeping pill for that one, but still managed to watch a movie, have a meal, and try not to touch the person I didn't know sitting to my left. We hadn't managed to get better seats for the long-haul flight, but that was fine. Such is life! In Atlanta, early Monday morning, we had just enough time to visit the Delta lounge before our last leg of the journey. Steve has enough Delta miles from work travel to be a member, and he can bring a guest, so we went in and got breakfast. Out of an abundance of Fuck-It-All, I ordered a White Russian at 6:30 AM, because it kind of has coffee in it and it's on my list of cocktails to try and I didn't have to pay for it! So slightly tipsy, we went to our gate and got on the plane to Huntsville, where I promptly fell asleep again.
Although the trip was not the one I'd planned, it was the one I needed, and I had the best time. I found a new place to love, and I hope I can go back one day to visit it, and the other islands as well.
There you go! Aloha!
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