Gosh, it's been a few weeks. A few fabulous weeks, or at least one fab week. Hub and I and the little one, Nar, just returned from a one week vacation to Waikiki Beach, Hawaii. The last minute prep and general craziness stoked by my procrastinator tendencies made the departure day a hot mess, as they say. But we finally squeezed out of Dodge and left Dee and T to fend for themselves, aided in large part by their grandparents.
Memorable moments: A quick flight to our long layover in Seattle's airport brought on the leisurely mood of vacation like a direct line of something racy to the blood stream. With only one tiny child to tend, and our own personal baggage cart in the form of a stroller, we went hog wild and ordered dinner and drinks at the nearest fish monger establishment. We asked for a table with a view and pretended we weren't in, well, an airport. Dining at a regional chain. Really, we don't live in the suburbs and Hub doesn't wear white socks with Tevas (much).
Once in Hawaii, we used our masterful skills of negotiation to land an upgrade to a Toyota Corolla with a worm hole of a cigarette burn in the passenger seat. What power one wields with a 36% success rated internet coupon code!
From there, we found ourselves in a third floor room across from the elevator, sandwiched between the housekeeping supply closet and the ice machine. Score. We even had full view of the laundry lines tacked outside the apartments across the street, porches jammed to the gills with those huge plastic toddler toys whose utility on this earth will never come close to counterbalancing the storage space they suck up. I believe this view was a sign, just to remind us that we will never, ever, ever be able to afford real life in Honolulu.
It all ended well because after a couple nights, we were able to move up to a deluxe corner room in the sky. Complete with a blink-and-you'll-miss-it partial ocean view. It was more than I ordered. If I laid on the pull out couch just so, I could see the Pacific's vivid turquoise blue water, a pure reflection of the sky on a sunny day. Glimpses of that yummy blue, dabbed with red sea canoes, sailboats and wave riders, and an overlay of palm trees in the foreground, are my lasting memories of Waikiki.
Beyond my frequent pulls on the view, joy and sustenance for me came from a steady supply of chocolate covered macadamia nuts. Three days into the trip, I began hiding mostly eaten bags (we're talking family size), in an effort to disguise the volume of my only-in-Hawaii-nut-consumption. When we were newly established in our boss room, Hub stumbled upon a Mauna Loa bag in the closet and mistook it as trash leftover from previous guests. Mumbling something about what a wacky sweet tooth he married, I quickly gobbled up the evidence.
Also of note was our daily three point agenda (read, drink and eat). Hub and I had an insatiable need to simply. Sit. And read. Our books. It was more difficult to accomplish than imagined. This is because one kid is still a kid who needs to eat and poop and bounce up and down in a happy, friendly way. And as anyone not in vacation mode might suspect, the baby will communicate these needs by crying.
Hub and I weren't prepared for the crying. Somehow, we thought the demanding aspects of Nar's baby Dom would float away with the gentle waves on Waikiki beach, allowing seasoned parents to ease into a quiet vacation like the ten year old snowboarder turned surfer who is permitted to ride a brief - but thrilling - swell before pouring back among the tourists. In the end, the ten year old kid got farther than we did with his dreams. I couldn't completely ignore my baby, or allow her to loll in the sand, but I still finished most of my book. It just took until the end of the trip and a regular evening at home to get the job done.
Other daily activities varied, but we followed this general schedule: go to ocean, get free drinks at hotel's cocktail hour, eat sushi. Repeat. One other must do for me was to toast my ten years of marriage to Hub at a bar called "RumFire." RumFire is located on the Pacific's edge at the base of a posh hotel. It boasts huge iron bowls of fire that flicker in the night. Romance. Pure romance.
We stumbled upon the establishment early in the trip and I was bound and determined to own that place with my new three inch cork sandals and floral Target wrap dress. As the days passed, I got in the habit of referring to RumFire in an attempted sexy, but probably just phlegmmy, voice. The kind of voice that makes its appearance on vacation when the conversations are really just layers and layers of stupid jokes.
We didn't make it to RumFire until the last night of the trip. Despite some breeziness during the dinner hour at a sandwich shop (I needed cash for that fab cocktail); I led my little team to a primo table on an empty patio. Score! When the breeze morphed to wind and light rain, Hub suggested we move inside. I was undeterred and began to unwrap my wrap dress to nurse Nari. During the whole feeding process, the rain became an official downpour and the umbrella my Hub heaved over to cover us did little to protect the fam from Mother Nature's rage. After that, Hub rushed inside to grab a table for us while I sat like a bump on a log, waiting for Nari to finish. She was wet and I was undressed, naked before the sea turtles somewhere out there in the abyss. In the hasty transition from romance on the beach to sports fan's Mecca inside, I lost my nursing pads to the sea, and stumbled into the bar with a significantly watered down drink.
We shared a table with a grumpy German couple, competing with the flat screens to trade the last of our stupid jokes. But no worries. My mind and soul had already moved on to my last half bag of macadamia nuts waiting for me at the hotel. Mahalo!
