Sunrise this morning at Diamond Head (It kills me that my pictures don't show up bigger on here, my font won't go smaller, and centering a few words centered them all. Blogspot is about to lose a participant.)
One of the first things I noticed about Oahu this morning was all the green. Green, green, green, everywhere...on the people. Packers fans are taking over the world. More on that later.
Why am I sitting in a darkened hotel room, blogging, when I'm in paradise? Not sure. It's Eva's naptime and, as I've been up and about since 4:30am and it's now 11:45am, I need a little downtime. But I pounded so much coffee at breakfast that I can't nap. Also, I really regreat not writing about Thailand closer to our time there. I have notes and I'll do it someday. Speaking of paradise, yes, Hawaii is all it's cracked up to be.
Flying from Virginia to here was no joke. It was something like 6 hours from Dulles to San Francisco and 5 from SF to Honolulu. A quick sidenote on that: before I had the Good News Girl in my possession, I used to think that travelling was tiring and stressful. There's the mind-sucking boredom, the electronic siren-song screen of the constant TV to keep you from napping (rather, suckers like me), the difficulty breathing that I have in all airplane seats except for Thai Air (seriously, they collapse my chest just the wrong way), and the threat of having a massive flare like I did this one time in college when I foolishly didn't get up during the whole red-eye from California to Virginia and when I finally tried to get off I couldn't straighten my knees for days and my cankles were drowning in vats of synovial fluid so that I could hardly jam my red Vans on. I didn't get this, of course, until I had the baby: When you're flying by yourself, you just have to sit there. Make your plane, and sit on it. Enjoy it, O Childless Ones. If you've been making efforts to join the parental ranks and haven't gotten there yet, console yourself with a nice relaxing airplane ride to somewhere cool where the only jetlag you'll have to tend to is your own.
But I digress.
The GNG is a great traveller. As I was wheeling her through Dulles to catch our first flight, she fell dead asleep and stayed that way all the while I was waiting to get on (Mean Gate Guy wouldn't let me board early, even at the urging of a nice first class passenger who felt guilty about going before me), through boarding the plane (detatching her car seat from the wheels and heaving it onto the seat) and through takeoff. And we were flooded with goodwill from other travellers. People offered help, said nice things to us, flight attendants gave us free food (United fruit & cheese platter: a baby Yes, especially the gouda in Eva's case) and let us hang out in their spaces, played games with the GNG, and on and on. I even met a Marine wife with a 20-month old on our flight to Honolulu with whom I could commiserate about the fact that no matter if things go perfectly--with a toddler on a plane, Mom still winds up a hot, sweaty mess. And, if you're me, covered in yogurt. So grateful for the change of clothes I packed.
In other news, the existence of Economy Plus seating is evidence of God's common grace. One of the many reasons is that GNG's feet weren't pressed up against the seat in front of her, leading to irresistible kicking urges. Everybody wins. We only had it for the second flight, not the first, which really drove home its advantages.
It's so fun to see people's reactions to her. A lot of people stare (in wonderment at her eyes, which are the color of the stormy sea? Don't worry, I don't inflate her ego to her face that much.). Women give her a look that is familiar to me--interest and mushiness, if they're my age, or overwhelming nostalgia for their grown up babies, if they're older. Their husbands do sort of the same. What's funny to me is the younger, obviously childless men. They stare at her with fascination and trepidation, like she's some sort of beautiful alien.
I was swimming through a fog of nauseated exhaustion by the time we landed here, but the Honolulu airport gave me an impression of quaintness and authentic island life: tanned, wrinkly people in not enough clothes; a broken elevator resulting in a dash past a disapproving escalator attendant with my Marine wife buddy (our babies survived the escalator in their Britax car seats / Go Go Babyz wheels just fine, thank you); a muggy, breezy outdoor walkway to the baggage claim on which I noticed that the airport traffic seems to consist entirely of military folks, surfer dudes, and the occasional "pasty Minnesotan" as my father-in-law would describe them.
This morning we were all up by 5 so we headed over to Diamond Head to try to catch the sunrise. In true Martha fashion, we arrived about 10 minutes afterward but still caught some amazing views and hit a bit of a lull in the crowds. I think I heard "kawaii!!" 100 times on the way up. (GNG was on the Pater Familias' back in the Ergo.) At one point we were at a bit of a bottleneck where you have to crawl into a bunker to start the hike down, and Nathan was backed into a corner squatting with a Japanese couple standing behind him. The man surreptitiously took some pictures of Eva. 90% of the people who weren't Japanese were wearing Packers shirts. They seem like a nice, all-American crowd. I can live with that. Later at breakfast the game was starting, so several of them were gathered around the bar, omelets and white wine in hand, cheering boisterously.
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