When a friend you’ve known since college invites you to join her family for Spring Break in Hawaii, you say yes.
At home, Spring proceeds by fits and starts. I’ve frolicked in the April sun, but I’ve also stood shivering in the April rain, and cursed the April snow. I’ve also been misled by brilliant sunshine, and shivered in the chill wind. It was a joy to spend some time on Ohau, immersed in the warm bath of tropical air.
It’s been a while since I’ve traveled to a tropical island. I’d almost forgotten how much I like palm trees, and bougainvillea, and all the richness of a climate where every living being doesn’t need a survival strategy for winter or for water conservation.
I’m a morning person who lives many time zones further east, and that meant that I supervised the dawn almost every day I was there. Although the resort faced west, and the actual sunrise was behind the mountains and behind the buildings, it was truly delightful to sit on the balcony in my pajamas, in the warm darkness, to watch the sky lighten and hear the birds wake up one by one until they were chattering all around me. Early morning yoga classes by the water as the light strengthened were also lovely.
You would think that a west-facing resort would have a spectacular sunset every night too, but most days a cloud bank rolled in late afternoon, obscuring the sunset. We did get one spectacular red globe sinking into the ocean on the last day. As usual, the snapshot does it no justice, but I feel obligated to capture the setting sun, ocean, and palm trees, to remind myself if nothing else.
I also feel obligated to indulge my geeky side and note my fascination with the rocky shore near the resort. I grew up with rocky beaches, and tide pools, and large chunks of granite that form a shoreline defined by the glaciers of the most recent ice age. I was fascinated to gaze into tide pools once again (not pictured) but this time on a shelf of eroded coral and hardened lava that had flowed directly into the sea, leaving behind fascinating striations and undulations and pockets.
Oahu is one of the older Hawaiian islands, and has moved past the hot spot, so it no longer has an active volcano. I was a little sorry to have flown all the way across the continent and halfway across the ocean and not visited the local National Park on the Big Island, but all the more reason to come back.
One morning we visited the Pearl Harbor National Memorial and the USS Arizona Memorial.
It was very moving and I’m grateful for the Park Service and Navy personnel who make it possible to visit.
Later we drove out to the North Shore. The beaches are just as spectacular as their reputation.
While we were there, we saw one of the highlights of the trip, for me. Without specifically going looking for them, we saw a bale of Hawaiian Green Sea Turtles (yes, bale is the right word for a group of turtles, and yes, I had to look it up) swimming under the bridge as we were walking across it.
Again, the photo doesn’t at all capture how big and how graceful they are. We must have stood there for half an hour just watching them swim upstream, and pop their heads above water and to breathe, and blink their prehistoric eyes at the world above water. I can understand why people book tours just to see this- we were extremely fortunate that we were just there at the right time.
While the things we did and saw were wonderful, one of the truly best parts of the trip, for me, was the chance to sit around near and in the pool and catch up with a friend who I’ve known since college and haven’t spent much time together with since then. I have to say, poolside in Oahu is a significant step up from the IHOP on Soldier’s Field Road where we would spend hours studying for our inorganic chemistry exams and drinking bottomless cups of coffee more years ago than I like to count.
I’d have my license to blog revoked if I didn’t include one poolside selfie in my giant sun hat.
It’s a long flight back to the East Coast. I think the clearest sunset I saw was this one, on my way home.
