I love this place

And the plane you rode in on . . .

We flew in to Kona and had a two hour layover while waiting for our island hopper flight to Honolulu.


I pulled out my notebook and wrote, I am , pure and simple, in Heaven. It's about 78 degrees and I'm sitting in the Kona airport waiting ares with a delightful breeze caressing my skin, Hawaiian music lilting through the loudspeakers, and little brown birds hopefully hopping around my feet. How many times have you sat waited for a connectiong flight while appreciating the rattle of palm fronds and the twittering of small birds?


My skin is happy to be bare to this soft warm air. Actually, my skin wants a lot more exposure than my slacks and short-sleeved shir allow, but I don't imagine the people around me would appreciate it if I started peeling down to the buff. Or not-so-buff as the case may be. That much fishbelly whiteness could frighten small children and nauseate anyone with finely honed aesthetic sensebilities.

Butterfly! Ha! When have you ever seen a butterfly in an airport waiting area? I adore Kona airport.

The flight to Honolulu was in a much smaller jet. It could have held 52 passengers. There were 21 of us. DH and I sat up fron and chattted with the steward as we passsed over breathtaking views of Molokai, Lanai and Maui. We were relatively low, and I kept thinking I was seeing boats on the ocean. "There's a boat. No - wait - it was just a wave. There's a boat! No - another wave. There's a whale. . . no, a wave. A nuclear submarine . . . no, a wave." Then DH remarked, "There's a missle cruiser." And there was. A big American battleship motoring purposefully through the tropical sunshine. I bet the sailors like being stationed here. No one is shooting at them.

My niece set us up at the Embassy Suites Hotel in Waikiki, and because she knows people, she got us a killer deal on a fabulous room. Fab-u-lous!!
The view looking one way from our lanai.

The view looking the other way.

The view looking straight down into the hotel pool. The scallop on the left is the hot tub. The scallop on the right is the wading pool. The scallop soon to be decorating a lounge is me. Gloryoskie the air feels good here!!

So, today, DH and I are grabbing a nephew as beast of burden and heading out to the flea market at the Aloha Bowl stadium. The boys want to get North Shore t-shirts seconds, and I'm searching for Hilo Hattie's fabric scraps. Here are a few shots of the assembled Dahl family.

My 90 year old mother, Dorothy Dahl

Dorothy's oldest son (my brother Chuck) and his daughter, my fabulous niece Lisa

Roxie and nephew Norman, our intended beast of burden.

Michael, the youngest sprout of the Dahl family, his dad, Chris, and Chris's mom, Arleen, married to chuck for nigh on fifty years.
I know, photos of other people's familya re dead boring, but you should have references for the cast of characters for the next few days madness. For example, we can't leave Mom alone with a TV remote, because she doesn't know how to work them, but she tries, and has wound up buying four pay-per-view while trying to change the channels. Mom pretty much gave up on modern technology any more complicated than a rotary phone. When it comes to TV remotes, she just keeps pushing buttons till something comes on that she likes, or till it gives up altogether. Luckily, she hasn't gotten the adult channel by mistake. She would just throw a towel over the screen and leave the room. After she had figured out why the pony was there.