Three's the charm...

SO. I guess I had a lot of reasons for wanting to go to Hawaii (after all, who wouldn't want to go) and I'll be sharing a few of those reasons in future posts. But the fact that our trip was spectacularly successful is really something of a miracle. You see, it's the third time I have tried to make the trip. To say that the previous two tries were unsuccessful is sort of like saying that the Titanic was buoyancy-challenged.

My first attempt occurred somewhere around January of 1980. Mother and Daddy rented a large home in Maui for the purpose of having a family reunion. At the time, Randy and I were starving college students so they graciously paid our way to the islands and even provided us with a little bit of pocket money. We were not able to take Annike, however, and as a new mom who had never been separated from her little darling for more than a few hours, I was totally panicked at the prospect of flying a few thousand miles (each way) over water and spending a whole week away from my baby. Had any of us known what was in store, we could have saved ourselves the trouble and spent the week at home, sitting under a warm shower, shoving money down the drain.

We arrived in Honolulu on a Saturday afternoon, took a white-knuckle special over to Maui, and settled in for a week on the beach. Sunday was cloudy, but warm--and coming from the snow and near freezing temperatures of Utah, we didn't complain. Monday it hit us. According to newspaper accounts, it was the "worst disaster to hit Maui since World War II." Some tropical cyclone spun out of the eastern Pacific and slammed into the islands with a vengeance. Apart from spending day after day stuck in the house, the only two clear memories I have of the trip are trying to find an open store to buy groceries and watching a car parked near the shoreline get washed out to sea, and later watching the floodwaters rise up to our calves INSIDE the rental car while we made a mad dash to the airport for yet another white-knuckle special back to Honolulu. It was like something out of a cartoon--we opened the doors of the car at the airport and a little Niagara Falls spilled out of each opening. I don't remember how much Daddy paid the rental car company for the damage, but it was significant. Here's a picture of our first day:

And here's a picture of what the rest of the vacation looked like:

Total. Freaking. Disaster.

Many years later, Mother and I got to talking about trying to go again. Her sister, Mary Pleasants, had been born in Hawaii and Mother had lived there briefly before Pearl Harbor and the two of them had been back many times and just loved it. Mary was able to book us rooms at the Hale Koa (the luxury hotel reserved for military members and retirees) right on Waikiki beach so we decided to make it an estrogen fest and go together along with my girls, Annike and Megan. We were scheduled to leave from Charlotte on December 24, 2003, but the girls and I were going to drive up to Charlotte the night before and spend the night with Mother and Mary in order to catch our flight the next morning. While we were packing, we got a call from my cousin, Lynn, that mother had been admitted to the hospital with severe abdominal pain and that we'd best come now. A frantic three and a half hour drive later, I arrived at the emergency room to be told that she had slipped away just about twenty minutes earlier. I've always wondered why I was able to travel from Athens, Greece, to Los Angeles in time to see my father before he passed away, but was unable to drive 260 miles from Atlanta to Charlotte in time to see my mother.

SO. Not only did we never make that trip, the simple thought of going always tended to bring back the painful memory of losing mother. God, she was SO much fun! Always ready to travel, always ready to get up and go. Here's a favorite picture of her, on one of her many trips with Grand Circle Travel (this one might have been the trip to China--not sure):

We completely dropped the idea of going until just a couple of months ago when my "bucket list" started calling again (more about that later). I gingerly began thinking about it, quietly began talking about it, made the reservations while holding my breath and keeping all fingers, toes and eyes crossed, but only Annike was brave enough to go public. Benjamin thought it was supposed to be a surprise for Megan because she never said a word about it until he finally asked her the day before she was to leave. She told him she couldn't bear to hardly think about it much less talk about it lest the Hawaiian Vacation Gods were listening and decided to slam dunk us yet again.

BUT. Three is aparently the charm. Every single day there, I thought of Mother and Daddy and Mike and Randy and how they all should have been there to enjoy it this time.

But we did our damndest to enjoy it for them. Aloha!