Honeymoon in a Nutshell
Sunday
We left for the airport. When we arrived at the terminal, I learned that our destination was to be none other than Kona, on the Big Island of Hawaii. I'd never been to Kona, and got understandably excited.
I shall skip over the six-hour flight because it was a six-hour flight much like any other six-hour flight.
We arrived in Kona and went to get our rental car, and upon learning that it was our honeymoon the guy at the desk, instead of giving us the white Ford Fusion we had reserved, upgraded us to a red Mustang. Yeah. It was awesome.
Checked into the timeshare that his parents had let us use, which was about a twenty-minute walk from downtown Kona. We decided to walk into town and eat dinner. Ate at a completely forgettable cafe on the beach (as forgettable as a cafe on the beach can be), walked back to the room, decided we were tired and went straight to bed.
Monday
Went to a presentation on the activities offered by the resort because, hey, they would give us free breakfast. I'm fairly sure the fitness instructor was Lockhart fallen on bad times.
Jeremy decided he was tired and wanted a nap, so I made a cup of tea (not as pleasant in 85 F muggy weather, but still good) and wrote a bit of my Nevlly. Then, since we had a full kitchen at our disposal, we went grocery shopping so we weren't spending $100 on food every day. (Still expensive, though - a box of dried spaghetti was $4!) We also had the concierge book us a nice dinner that evening and our helicopter tour for Wednesday.
Nice dinner was nice. If you're going to have fish, there really isn't a better place to have it than on an island that, you know, has had fish as a part of their goddamn menu for centuries.
Tuesday
DOLPHIN DAY DOLPHIN DAY
I had told Jeremy that my one requirement for our honeymoon was that I wanted to swim with dolphins. And he delivered.
By the way, the Hilton Waikaloa Village is... intimidatingly luxurious. Apparently the cheapest rooms are $300 a night, but it just might be worth it to be able to use the resort. Their pools are all connected by wide channels and fed by the ocean, so you get fish and turtles right there in the goddamn swimming pools. It was gorgeous.
And they have dolphins.
For the mere cost of half the month's rent, we were able to put on life jackets and play with THIS lovely fellow:
His name is Ipo and he is 10 months old, just old enough to be introduced to people and perform some of the behaviors like being held up by complete and total strangers and swimming around with us and taking food from us. Alas, this is the only photo I have of us, and we only got this one because it was given to us free for being honeymooners. I'm not keen on paying $22 for a 5x7 photo, tyvm, and we weren't allowed to bring our own cameras (which is okay, because then we'd have been taking pictures instead of swimming with dolphins).
I got a magnificent sunburn, because apparently my sunblock washes off easily in salt water.
I wrote a decent amount of Nevlly by hand on a shady bench by a lagoon while Jeremy explored the resort, and then we headed home for a nap and dinner. We'd need to be up early the next day.
Wednesday
I mentioned helicopters above. We'd booked a doors-off helicopter tour that was going to fly us over fucking lava in the active volcano Kilauea. Yeah, that's right, fucking lava. In a helicopter.
Unfortunately, the helicopter tour started a three hours drive from us, and so at 8:30 in the morning we got into our little red Mustang and began the drive.
Here's the thing about the Big Island - of the 13 possible climate conditions on earth, it has been confirmed to have 11 of them. Which meant that in the space of, say, 1/8th of a mile, it is entirely possible to cross from a desert that gets 50 inches of rain a year to a rainforest that gets 200 inches of rain a year, and the line of demarcation is very obvious. It's crazy. But it's still not crazy enough to make us less irritated at driving for three hours.
And then, when we got to Hilo, and were about to get on the copters, it started pouring down rain. Buckets. The pilots waited for about half an hour, watching the satellite radar, but it wasn't going to let up that afternoon and our tour was cancelled.
So. We'd driven three hours, and would have to drive three hours back, and we didn't get to see fucking lava. Full refund, of course, but we didn't get to see fucking lava.
At this point, we were grumpy. And when we get grumpy, we start picking little fights. So the three hour drive back was not nearly as pleasant as the three hour drive there and we were nearly on the verge of sleeping in separate bedrooms that night before we came to our senses and cooked up a truce.
Thursday
Our truce involved doing nothing but spending a day on the beach and then going out to a luau.
The beach was a beach. It was lovely, white velvety sand and water so blue that we tried to find a new word for it. AND I SWAM. I NEVER swim in the ocean because it scares the bejeezus out of me, but I SWAM IN THE OCEAN. Aren't you proud of me?
And then the luau. If you've never been to a luau, it's hard to describe, and if you have been then you know what it was like because every luau is the same. It was a luau.
Friday
A lot of nothing. We went to a presentation of the property in order to get the discount card for the area merchants, which meant two hours of finding more and more polite and convoluted ways to say "No, we don't want to buy timeshare property."
Went back to the room. Jeremy napped. I wrote and read out on the porch. I made friends with four geckos and a mongoose and ate a bowl of popcorn and had a mai tai and a beer and some macadamia nuts.
This may sound dull, but it was wonderful. Sometimes on a holiday you just have to slow down and do NOTHING. And nothing is what we did until we went out to a nice-ish dinner later that day.
Saturday
We were NOT going to drive for three hours again. But dammit, we were going to go see some lava. So we signed up for a bus tour of the island.
Let me tell you, driving for six hours and riding in a van for six hours with a tour guide are two COMPLETELY different things. This was laid back and chill. Our tour guide was that tall, gangly sort of person you wouldn't expect to have the voice he did (sort of like Benedict Cumberbatch) and he was very pleasant to listen to, so it was more like being inside a National Geographic documentary. Lunch, dinner, and snacks were included, so basically all we had to do was kick back and hike where he pointed us.
And yeah. We saw some motherfucking lava once the sun set.
Sunday
On a plane again. Not exciting. Got home around 10pm and spent some time catching up on the internet.
And that was my honeymoon.
We left for the airport. When we arrived at the terminal, I learned that our destination was to be none other than Kona, on the Big Island of Hawaii. I'd never been to Kona, and got understandably excited.
I shall skip over the six-hour flight because it was a six-hour flight much like any other six-hour flight.
We arrived in Kona and went to get our rental car, and upon learning that it was our honeymoon the guy at the desk, instead of giving us the white Ford Fusion we had reserved, upgraded us to a red Mustang. Yeah. It was awesome.
Checked into the timeshare that his parents had let us use, which was about a twenty-minute walk from downtown Kona. We decided to walk into town and eat dinner. Ate at a completely forgettable cafe on the beach (as forgettable as a cafe on the beach can be), walked back to the room, decided we were tired and went straight to bed.
Monday
Went to a presentation on the activities offered by the resort because, hey, they would give us free breakfast. I'm fairly sure the fitness instructor was Lockhart fallen on bad times.
Jeremy decided he was tired and wanted a nap, so I made a cup of tea (not as pleasant in 85 F muggy weather, but still good) and wrote a bit of my Nevlly. Then, since we had a full kitchen at our disposal, we went grocery shopping so we weren't spending $100 on food every day. (Still expensive, though - a box of dried spaghetti was $4!) We also had the concierge book us a nice dinner that evening and our helicopter tour for Wednesday.
Nice dinner was nice. If you're going to have fish, there really isn't a better place to have it than on an island that, you know, has had fish as a part of their goddamn menu for centuries.
Tuesday
DOLPHIN DAY DOLPHIN DAY
I had told Jeremy that my one requirement for our honeymoon was that I wanted to swim with dolphins. And he delivered.
By the way, the Hilton Waikaloa Village is... intimidatingly luxurious. Apparently the cheapest rooms are $300 a night, but it just might be worth it to be able to use the resort. Their pools are all connected by wide channels and fed by the ocean, so you get fish and turtles right there in the goddamn swimming pools. It was gorgeous.
And they have dolphins.
For the mere cost of half the month's rent, we were able to put on life jackets and play with THIS lovely fellow:
His name is Ipo and he is 10 months old, just old enough to be introduced to people and perform some of the behaviors like being held up by complete and total strangers and swimming around with us and taking food from us. Alas, this is the only photo I have of us, and we only got this one because it was given to us free for being honeymooners. I'm not keen on paying $22 for a 5x7 photo, tyvm, and we weren't allowed to bring our own cameras (which is okay, because then we'd have been taking pictures instead of swimming with dolphins).
I got a magnificent sunburn, because apparently my sunblock washes off easily in salt water.
I wrote a decent amount of Nevlly by hand on a shady bench by a lagoon while Jeremy explored the resort, and then we headed home for a nap and dinner. We'd need to be up early the next day.
Wednesday
I mentioned helicopters above. We'd booked a doors-off helicopter tour that was going to fly us over fucking lava in the active volcano Kilauea. Yeah, that's right, fucking lava. In a helicopter.
Unfortunately, the helicopter tour started a three hours drive from us, and so at 8:30 in the morning we got into our little red Mustang and began the drive.
Here's the thing about the Big Island - of the 13 possible climate conditions on earth, it has been confirmed to have 11 of them. Which meant that in the space of, say, 1/8th of a mile, it is entirely possible to cross from a desert that gets 50 inches of rain a year to a rainforest that gets 200 inches of rain a year, and the line of demarcation is very obvious. It's crazy. But it's still not crazy enough to make us less irritated at driving for three hours.
And then, when we got to Hilo, and were about to get on the copters, it started pouring down rain. Buckets. The pilots waited for about half an hour, watching the satellite radar, but it wasn't going to let up that afternoon and our tour was cancelled.
So. We'd driven three hours, and would have to drive three hours back, and we didn't get to see fucking lava. Full refund, of course, but we didn't get to see fucking lava.
At this point, we were grumpy. And when we get grumpy, we start picking little fights. So the three hour drive back was not nearly as pleasant as the three hour drive there and we were nearly on the verge of sleeping in separate bedrooms that night before we came to our senses and cooked up a truce.
Thursday
Our truce involved doing nothing but spending a day on the beach and then going out to a luau.
The beach was a beach. It was lovely, white velvety sand and water so blue that we tried to find a new word for it. AND I SWAM. I NEVER swim in the ocean because it scares the bejeezus out of me, but I SWAM IN THE OCEAN. Aren't you proud of me?
And then the luau. If you've never been to a luau, it's hard to describe, and if you have been then you know what it was like because every luau is the same. It was a luau.
Friday
A lot of nothing. We went to a presentation of the property in order to get the discount card for the area merchants, which meant two hours of finding more and more polite and convoluted ways to say "No, we don't want to buy timeshare property."
Went back to the room. Jeremy napped. I wrote and read out on the porch. I made friends with four geckos and a mongoose and ate a bowl of popcorn and had a mai tai and a beer and some macadamia nuts.
This may sound dull, but it was wonderful. Sometimes on a holiday you just have to slow down and do NOTHING. And nothing is what we did until we went out to a nice-ish dinner later that day.
Saturday
We were NOT going to drive for three hours again. But dammit, we were going to go see some lava. So we signed up for a bus tour of the island.
Let me tell you, driving for six hours and riding in a van for six hours with a tour guide are two COMPLETELY different things. This was laid back and chill. Our tour guide was that tall, gangly sort of person you wouldn't expect to have the voice he did (sort of like Benedict Cumberbatch) and he was very pleasant to listen to, so it was more like being inside a National Geographic documentary. Lunch, dinner, and snacks were included, so basically all we had to do was kick back and hike where he pointed us.
And yeah. We saw some motherfucking lava once the sun set.
Sunday
On a plane again. Not exciting. Got home around 10pm and spent some time catching up on the internet.
And that was my honeymoon.