I'm sure you all missed me last week while I was off camping in Kaua'i, but rest assured that I made it back in (mostly) one piece and have an abundance of stories to tell.
Let me start by saying that I was still getting punk'd by life, even after the food situation was solved and I had arrived in Kaua'i.
I met the crew at the Honolulu airport at 1:15pm and everybody was there on time, so my first worry about traveling with seven young people (not all are technically teenagers, but that's how I think of them) was assuaged. However, I don't think these kids travel off island much, or at least not without parents, because they had a myriad of questions about what to do before we even hit security. I was glad I had checked everyone in online and kept the boarding passes.
The flight from Honolulu to Lihue, Kaua'i only has you in the air for about twenty minutes. I think it's my favorite flight ever. Heaven. I barely made a dent in The Economist I bought at the airport (the only time I'll spend that kind of cash on a magazine...Karri knows what I'm talking about, haha). Getting our bags in Lihue was also a super speedy process, and everything came through fine.
"M" met us at the airport and followed us to the rental car place after Jose picked us up. It was at the rental car pickup that we encountered our first snag - I was definitely glad M was there.
The federal government is self-insured, and as such, employees are not required to have any kind of proof of insurance when doing things like renting giant 15 passenger vans in which to drag teenagers around islands. This vans'r'us type place did not seem to understand that, and wanted proof of personal driver's insurance. Having not driven on a regular basis in the last four years, I do not have such insurance. M stepped in and said he would fax them a copy of his personal insurance card that night, and they seemed appeased by that.
Following M, we started out on our one hour drive back to the Hanalei National Wildlife Refuge (NWR) where we would be camping, with a quick stop at an overlook to see the Hule'ia NWR. Kaua'i has one main road, basically a two lane highway that has lots of curves, turns, and one lane bridges. An excellent place for my first time driving a vehicle that large...
But everything was fine. I did a great job.
And then I crashed the van.
Ok, I'm being a little dramatic. After an hour on the windy road, we pulled onto the Hanalei NWR road, and the end was a mere fifty feet away. I turned right into the yard/driveway area, and promptly hit a fence post with my passenger side. Apparently I didn't gauge the necessary turn width properly. I realized this with a simultaneous CRUNCH from the van door and a slightly too late STOP from the kids.
That's when I just wanted to lay my head on the steering wheel and cry and then go home. Strangely, that wasn't an option. I had to unload kids and luggage and set up a tent, and face all kinds of embarrassment. Turns out not only the kids and M saw it happen, but one of the volunteers staying in the bunkhouse and was on the porch when he saw me "ruin my day." Awesome. (This lovely fella told the whole Kaua'i Refuge Complex what happened, which you'll hear about later.)
So I sucked it up and dealt with campsite setup. We camped behind the refuge bunkhouse (which is way nicer than my bunkhouse). M and I took the kids to a beach and left them there while we went to his house and got Costco pizza and lasagna ready for dinner. That's when I had my mini meltdown - just got choked up, no actual crying, but M was great and told me about knocking a sideview mirror off a government vehicle. And then he gave me a sorely needed rum and orange juice.
After dinner M and I went grocery shopping at the most expensive grocery store in Hawaii. Six dollars for a loaf of bread?!? No wonder Kaua'i is having food sovereignty conferences!
The rest of the night passed fairly uneventfully, although I still felt depressed about the van. M said he'd take care of figuring out what we needed to do, so that was nice. I really did not want to make that call to my boss: "Um, hi. I kind of had an accident with the rental van..." It'd be like telling my parents about my Echo mishap when I was sixteen all over again.
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment