Cobblings from My Memories

I recently stumbled across this photo on my phone. Upon first glance, you'd assume this was taken in a bathroom from a hotel. More specifically, a Hampton Inn. That's what it says right there on the towel, right?

Well you'd be wrong. That towel is in my bathroom back home in Louisville. And it's not alone. There's probably 10 or so more towels exactly like that, from hotels all over this great land of ours (more specifically, the route between Louisville and New Jersey).

I don't know how to describe it other than to say my family loved taking mementos from our vacations. My father's favorite thing was taking hotel towels. I'm not saying we were the Bonnie and Clyde family of Kentucky. No gunplay or violence. For one damn reason or another, we ended up with a whole washroom filled with towels from vacation hotels. There's no better explanation than that.

Once on a trip to Florida my dad convinced me to steal a dinner plate from a restaurant just because it was shaped like a fish and I thought it was cool. I don't think I have that plate anymore, but I'll always remember how funny it was to be talked into stealing dinnerware from a seafood restaurant when I was 20 years old. That's the weird things we did on our family vacations. Malice or ill will was never part of it, and we didn't go into vacations thinking we'd snatch a towel.

It'd just happen. You're a family of five crammed into a hotel room and when you wake up to leave everything just gets thrown into luggage and the occasional towel made it in. It started happening so often that we all got a chuckle out of it, and I'll always be secretly convinced my dad did it on purpose as a joke. That was the kind of guy he was, teasing my mom when we returned home, "Don't throw away that towel that's a remembrance of our trip!" Mom would roll her eyes, fold it up and toss it on the basement shelf with the 15 other ones. Good times.

Golf on the Island

Normally when the wife and I go to Hawaii, I try to squeeze in at least two rounds of golf. But since I was dragging the wife to three UK basketball games while on a Hawaiian vacation, I figured more than one round of gold would be pushing my luck. I know, I'm such a sweet guy, always thoughtful.

So I played my one round, at the best course I've ever played, Kapalua's Plantation Course. They play PGA events there every year, and so the course is always in pristine condition (though what in Maui isn't pristine?). This was my fifth time playing Plantation, and I always find that it brings out a good round from me.

I had a lackluster 2010 in the golf realm, primarily because I didn't play much at all; I think I squeezed in 7-8 rounds all year, so needless to say I was bummed about my 2010 and was expecting very little from my game and was just hoping to avoid complete embarrassment or losing a whole box of golf balls on the front 9.

No worries, though, because as I said, Plantation brings out some good golf in me. I hit some good shots, some bad, had a horrible putting day, but thankfully my long game and approaches saved me. I escaped with an 88, which felt really good. It included a personal highlight caught on video, a 386-yard drive on the 18th hole. Yes, it's downhill and the northern winds are at your back, but I don't care. It feels great to tee it up high and smash a long drive. I love the video of it, where if you listen closely you can hear one of the guys I'm playing with say I smoked it. Love it.

Maui: A Fond Farewell

Looks like this will be my last post from Maui. I still have several hours left here before I head to the airport and the reverse trip from hell back to DC, where apparently it will be 40 degrees, snowy, rainy and windy as we land. Brilliant.

I will miss this island. I constantly refer to it as "my little slice of heaven." Sounds corny, but sometimes the truth sounds sillier than it is. No other place and no other vacation consistently brings me this much peace and happiness. The people, the food, the golf, the crashing waves, the quiet moments, the views, I could go on. But some of the moments and best parts I am keeping for myself. Moments and little things that I can always look back on, whether I am sitting at my desk back at 12th and G, sitting on the train stuck in the tunnel or caught in traffic on the Beltway, horns blaring around me.

I'll bring these times back and know that I will be back here soon. To drain another putt, watch more fish through my goggles or just sit and listen to the waves crash into the shores. I'll miss you, Maui. But I'll see you again soon.

Maui: Whale Watchin

Hell yes. I saw a couple whales breach today. And I got the sequence of one of them (pictured above) to prove it. Awesome.

And let me tell you, it was breathtaking to see in person. Today was my first-ever time on a boat. Well, a boat that was not called a ferry that took me from Jersey to Manhattan. I’ve been on those many times before. But this was different. Here we took a boat and went out into the Pacific specifically to look for whales.

On my previous two trips to Maui I always talked myself out of doing whale watching tours. Too expensive. Too long. Too likely to never see anything at all.

This time, however, I put away my self-pity and actually found a place called the Pacific Whale Foundation, which is a marine-supporting nonprofit. Right up my alley. I am all about the nonprofit doing good in the world. Plus, it’s better than giving it to a bunch of idiots just trying to make a buck who have no interest in actually delivering a fun and worthwhile experience.

Everyone went along, and lucky for us the boat was less than half full, so we were all able to move about without knocking a little tyke overboard (although there were a couple easy applicants for that honor).

Let me tell you, it was a whale extravaganza today. I have tons of photos to prove it. None of them are all that fantastic, and its mainly because the boat was listing like a roller coaster in the choppy seas, and also because since they are whales, they can’t just stop and talk to you.

By several peoples’ counts, we saw around 60-65 whales today, including four calves. It was stunning. These peaceful creatures just hung alongside the boat, or were in large pods of four or five. One pod we saw toward the end of the trip numbered close to 11, and it was amazing watching them all come up for air in unison.

My words read like child’s play in comparison to what my eyes and memories recall. Even the dolphin that chased alongside the boat as we headed to harbor was just icing on the cake. It was a truly stunning afternoon of watching these things just yards away from your face. 45 feet long, 30 tons in weight and just beautiful to look at. Very little could have made this a more meaningful adventure.

Maui: Ah, to be Young

Wednesday I got to play my second round of golf here on Maui. The first round on Monday, at Kapalua's Bay Course, was not as successful as I had hoped. Granted, it was my first time even swinging a club in 4 months, so some rust was to be expected. And while I was a beast on the greens and hit some very good tee shots, it was my fairway game that went south and stayed there the entire morning. The opening 9 was brutal, and the back 9 holes were much better, and I had the chance to close with three straight pars but missed some testy sidehill putts that just were too tough to read. Ended the round with a 97, which by that point I was pleased to have not exceeded 100.

My Wednesday round was at Kapalua's premier course, the Plantation Course, where the PGA Mercedes Benz Championship is played every January. Yeah, that's right, I was playing on a real-life PGA Tour course. The story of this round, beyond the majestic views of the ocean and the challenging holes that make a golfer use every club in the bag, was my playing partners. Steve and Bobby, from Connecticut. Steve is a financial planner (tough times there), while Bobby is toiling away improving his golf game.

Oh, and Bobby is Steve's 11-year-old son.

And he's a bad-ass golfer. I'm not saying he's Tiger. I'm just saying the kid was damn good. 200-yard drives. Flop shots, bunker shots, reading the greens. This kid was crazy good. And not a single ounce of humility in him. Part of it is because he's good ("Yeah, I tried to shape it around that bend in the fairway"). Part is because ... well ... he's 11. His dad did an admirable job of pushing him to succeed and pulling in the reigns when his pre-pubescent emotions got the better of him. By the time Bobby was sinking his putt to double-bogey the 585-yard 18th hole (for non-golfers, that is a LONG hole ... I got par, by the way!), he showed enough moxie to take off his visor and shake my hand.

"Thanks for helping me today, I learned a lot from you," he said. Learned what? How one person can three-putt from 11 feet? How not to hit an approach uphill over a bunker into 45 mph winds? Thankfully, he smiled and told me that I showed him how to hit longer drives and maintain balance through the swing. Sickens me to think how mature he is at 11. I was kicking soccer balls and being a typical 11-year-old idiot. Bobby is testing his skills for a Tour card. Ugh, to be young again.

Of course, my 92 did beat his score. So I have beating an 11-year-old in golf going for me. So that's nice.

Maui: View of the Beach

Yes, go ahead and hate me. I don't care. But I wanted to be fun and test out posting a video to this blog for the first time. I shot video with three different digital cameras, but for some reason I couldn't get the video to recognize. So I decided to go danger ghetto style and hold my laptop up so the iSight camera built into the screen could record. Total buddy way to do it, but it looks like it worked.

It's not the most exciting video ever shown, but it's more to prove to me that it works. Plus, it gives everyone a chance to see one of my views here in Maui of Black Rock beach and the area nearby. My hotel is the one at the far end of the view.

Maui: A Taste of Kentucky on the Island

Wish I had something massively important to say here, but I don't I just thought it cool that in the span of a two days, we found evidence of my home state here in Maui. The first came when the car we rented turned out to be made in Louisville. Want proof, they put a sticker in the car window (at right) telling you it was made there. That was pretty cool. Then later on we got a pleasant surprise when we saw the truck of one of the construction workers doing work on the hotel property. They truck (or at the very least, its mud flaps, once belonged to Manning Equipment. I have no idea who they are, but they must be good people since they are from the 'Ville.

Like I said, nothing exciting, but pretty cool to see some bluegrass representation on Maui. Better than finding a broken-down car or dead dog with KY tags on it.

Maui: 10,000 Feet of Pain

Searing pain. All through my body. That's what I feel hours after coming down from the Haleakala Crater, a volcano on Maui 10,000 feet above sea level.

The air was thin, the hiking was slow and I feel mocked by a couple from Alaska, but in the end I am very pleased at our efforts and glad I made the trek.

And a trek it was. Once you hit the summit (10,023 feet to be exact), you can take in all the expanse of the crater below (shown in the picture above). It's truly breathtaking, because while this is a national park and big highlight mentioned in many tourists books, no one actually comes up here. You kinda get have a run of the place, and you can see for miles and miles, and in either direction you see over the clouds because you drove above them to get up here. It's no Everest, but for a few hours you do indeed feel on top of the world.

The wife, her cousin Madeleine and I then began the hike down. Our original plan was to hike to the Kapalaoa Cabin, 5.8 miles down into the crater (it's about middle-bottom on the map image). Instead, we took a detour and hiked over to the Pu'u o Maui crater (above and between the 1 and 2 on the distance key of the map), one of the several craters left from the volcano's last eruption. It's about 2.6 miles from where we started, and the crater is a little less than a mile around. So the total trip was just over 5 miles total. You can see the wife and Madeleine on the other side of the Pu'u o Maui crater in the photo (and that's at 200 on my 80-200 long lens, so you can tell they are out there).
They say you have an existential/life changing/whatever kind of experience when you are out there, and while I didn't feel closer to god or one with the planet, I can say I felt something. I felt it enough to sit down alone, take out the iPod and crank a three-song setlist and sing loud and clear to echo it into the crater (thankfully, the enormously strong winds carried my voice the opposite direction from everyone else, so no critiques were forthcoming).

This is when the hike got ... ummm ... let's say interesting.

First, as opposed to the easygoing that led us down to the crater, everything back up to the top was ... as you can deduce ... uphill. Seems easy? Call me a chicken? Screw you, you do it, then. It was damn hard work. For all three of us no less. We all heaved and huffed and puffed to get back up to the top. And let us not forget that the reason you can see all these looks from there is because I was carrying 40 pounds of camera gear on my back. Easy to do when strutting around Paris, but much more difficult when up above the clouds and going uphill on trails made of sand.

Equally hurting the ego was the Alaskan couple who were powerwalking up the whole damn hill like it was nothing. As they passed (and no doubt, scoffed with their Palin-lovin voices), we found out they hike in Alaska all the time. But that wasn't the worst part. The worst was struggling to trudge up the hill while all these jolly-ass folks were going down. One couple had a newborn strapped to them in a harness, and that baby couldn't have been 10 months old. I'm sure that baby was eaten when the couple couldn't make it back up with the extra weight and they had to go cannibal. You won't convince me otherwise. They didn't look like they were from Alaska; more like Kansas to me. A few other groups of families with young children flew down the trails past us, and we three proud companions laughed heartily at their ignorance. During one of my seemingly hundreds of breaks to catch my breath and drink some water, I wanted to leave a little mark of the Campbler behind, so I made a little rock totem a few feet off the trail (photo of it at right).

After we reached the top, we raced back down to Paia, a hippie town that has, in my not-so-humble opinion, the best pizza on the planet. Every ounce of the food served is 100% organic and grown right there on the island, from the salad greens to the nitrate-free sausage and pepperoni. It was the best meal we will have on this trip, if nothing else because of the painful, yet wildly invigorating, journey we took to get there.

PS - Oh, and on the drive down the volcano after we left, Madeleine found a footnote buried in the visitors guide that making rock totems is forbidden. Ooops. My bad.

Maui: Taking on the Crater

Tomorrow (Tuesday) morning, we are waking up nice and early and attacking (OK, hiking) the crater at Haleakala Volcano. It's been inactive for decades, so I don't have to worry about going Joe Banks on anyone. Looking forward to it. We hiked about 2 miles of it last year on the honeymoon, but now we're aiming for one of the historical markers about 5 miles in. Sure, 5 miles doesn't sound like much, but the crater is more than a mile above sea level, so it's not going to be an easy trek. Especially hauling all my camera gear to document the excursion. Happy trails!

Maui: The Economics

When we first landed and got over to the beach, it was late and dark. The next day was a Friday, so I wrote it off that we got here before the weekend truly began.

It's now Sunday afternoon and one thing is for sure: The recession is definitely noticeable here. As one might say, it is on like Donkey Kong.

Wake up at 5:30 in the morning and you notice that there is no one walking around. It's not because it's 5:30; unless you are visiting from California, everyone here is from the middle or eastern part of the US or Europe, and nobody is sleeping in late. You get nods when passing other tourists on the sidewalk, a knowing, "yep, I passed out at 8 p.m. from exhaustion too, pal, and here we are together at dawn" kind of brotherhood.

Then you go to the grocery store, and all the people there are locals. Hardly any tourists buying supplies of sunscreen and kitschy towels and souvenirs. Go to the hotel pool around 11 a.m. and there are still lounge chairs to be had. Sure, they may be under the blazing sun, but last year on my honeymoon you would have filleted a small child for one of those suckers. Head over to the beach for some afternoon snorkeling and you almost have a free run of the place, when before you would be fending off flippers to the head and fat people from Michigan who keep touching the damn coral when everyone tells them not to because it will kill it.

Talking to two different hotel managers, I found that Maui's hotels are between 30-60% under fulfilled, depending on where you are staying. It shows. Restaurants you can get reservations without hassle. I made golf tee times at two of the top courses on the island without any trouble, and I could have named a time to strike the first ball and gotten it.

Yes, it's no surprise or new information to hear that the economy is in recession. But I will be the first to admit that even I thought that Hawaii could withstand some of it, especially on a holiday weekend. Clearly I was wrong, seeing the impact from one side of the nation to the other is telling.

Maui: Day 1

So we certainly accomplished a few things on our first day here. Took care of good food (ate at Mama's FIsh House, a swanky nice place along the northern coast). Scored a solid opening-trip breakfast at our favorite breakfast spot in Lahaina. Got in some solid pool time at the hotel pool (which turned out to be this massive pool with 5 or six pools connected by waterways so you can swim to each one without having to get out). But to top it all off, I even got another ritual out of the way ... my ability to get sunburned in the fastest, dumbest way possible. My pasty white skin just cannot handle the sun, so much that it's comical. Even layers of SPF 50 were not enough to stop me from being a total idiot, missing a few areas, and getting burned on them. As a small consolation, I now possess some spiffy (um, not really) racing stripes on my arms. It's studly, and sure to catch the eye of a hot girl in a bikini as she begins laughing at me.

My apologies for not getting pics up here thus far. My initial goal was to blanket the blog with galleries, but in the first day I took a bunch of photos and for some reason cannot download them off my backup digital camera. It's being cantankerous with my new laptop, so I will keep trying. I owe pictures involving a pig (you'll find out soon enough) and other topics. Off to sleep now so I can hopefully start off Saturday on a burn-free note.

24 Hours Later ... Peace

Thursday/Friday was a long day. You may not care, because the end result was me waking up this morning to the sound of waves crashing into the beaches here in Kaanapali, Maui, but suck it, it's my blog and I write what I want.

It all started by waking up at 5 in the morning in DC to finish packing and catch the ride to Dulles. We flew from Dulles to L.A., which was a fine flight except the jagoffs at United Airlines thought it a great idea to not serve any food on the flight that you didn't have to pay for ($9 for a turkey wrap the size of a White Castle burger), so I skipped food on the plane because I wasn't throwing away money on crap. Then, they showed a horrible movie on the plane (Greg Kinnear was the star, so I think that speaks for itself). So I read and read and read. 6 hours later we were in L.A.

The wife and I devoured some food once we arrived at LAX and then made our way to our connection. Luckily, United further proved its jagoffness by overbooking the LA-Maui flight by 13 seats. So we made the strategic move of bumping ourselves to the next flight. In exchange for a 2.5-hour delay and guaranteed seats, we both got free round-trip tickets as a bonus, and upgraded seats on the next flight. All-in-all, a winning proposal for me.

The LA-Maui flight was equally crap. Again, no food that didn't cost an arm and a leg (and the EXACT same options from our morning flight ... what the hell?). Again, no decent movie (that 'family' flick starring Dakota Fanning and some honeybee raisers). So I skipped that also and just read and read and read. Almost finished my book (review coming later), but my eyes were burning so I napped a little. We, 5 hours and 30 minutes later, finally landed, found our luggage and made our way to the hotel.

Again, we had eaten nothing, so we raced to beat the clock with room service, which closed in 45 minutes. By the time we ate and shut off the lights to pass out from exhaustion, it was 11:21 p.m., 5:20 a.m. back in DC. We had been up 24 hours straight. But then again, when we woke up, you see the scene above that we awoke to. So I guess not all is that bad.