Last day in Hawaii!!
Some jerk was pounding on our door at 4.30am. I finally got up and looked through the eye hole in the door to see him walking away. Okay I thought, and went back to bed. 10 minutes later the phone started ringing... Turns out that there was a tsunami alert and it was the manger who had been pounding on the door. The property management company wanted to get tourists to safe ground before the locals clogged the roads.
So much for sleeping in... I told Kenda to wake up, and she did without really knowing why. We packed quickly and checked out and made it to the Walmart parking lot by 6am. There were locals buying flats of water, rice and dog food. We bought some water and some food to eat during the day.The wave was supposed to hit at 11.19am. The parking lot became fuller and fuller as the morning progressed. The police shut down the roads leading to the lower levels of town around 10am, and people sat back and waited. We had tourists from Alaska on one side aqnd tourists from Lousiana on the other side of us. We enjoyed talking to the couple from Alaska throughout the morning, but time still dragged.
11.19am came... and nothing happened. The tsunami never materialized. Waves were apparently a little higher than normal, abut nothing we could see from our vantage point. The roads were kept closed until around 2pm when the alert was lifted and we were allowed back into the beach area.
Kenda and I decided to try to get back to our condo. We had checked out, but we hadn't showered and had been in the sun for almost 8 hours. We had also left some food in the fridge that we wanted to eat... I had left some fudge that I wanted to take home. We drove back to the condo and the staff had not made it back yet. One finally showed up, and we begged use of the condo for another hour to clean up and grab our food.
We were able to check in for our flight. Thanks goodness the wave didn't hit, because the airport in Kona is right on the ocean... Our original day was going to be fun with us doing some graffiti in lava fields - which is a local tradition using white coral. People write their names in the coral and others eventually re-use the coral to write their own messages. We were going to go swimming at one of the local beaches, go to Hilo Hattie and generally enjoy our last day in Hawaii. We took a drive down the highway to check out some areas we hadn't seen so far and did make it to Hilo Hattie to buy some Hawaiin gear. Dinner was at a place on the beach called Bongo Ben's that had been recommended by Ben,our Mauna Kea guide. Lot's of food for cheap works for me everytime... especially when the food is good. We'll go there again next time we visit.
We dropped our convertible off and went to the airport. We had 4 hours of waiting around at the airport. The Kona airport is old. There are no departure screens and the only way of knowing your flight is on time is to ask a check in person or to call the airline's 800 number. The holding area is outside though, and it was quite pleasant.
We found out that there wasn't enough jet fuel on the island to fill up our plane for the flight back to Vancouver and that we would have to make a stop in Honolulu (Oahu) to top off the tanks for the flight home. We departed Kona at 12.45am and I don't really remember the rest of the trip. Kenda watched a couple of movies on the flight to Vancouver, but I basically slept the whole way home.
Customs in Vancouver was simple, but we left our baggage behind due to a misunderstanding and an Air Canada supervisors' opinion that we should leave it and try to make our connecting flight to Vancouver. Our luggage eventually made it to Kamloops Sunday night. A funny thing happened to me in Vancouver. I had gone to the washroom in Kona and the button on my shorts fell off. I made it to Vancouver with no issues, but I had to keep my shorts from falling down to my ankles while we were running through the Vancouver airport. I had taken off my belt for security, and our time was so tight that I didn't put the belt on until we knew we were going to make our Kamloops flight. It was funny galloping throug hthe airport with my hand keeping my shorts up...
It was a rough end to the trip... but it was an adventure. And hey - we made it home no Sunday in time for the Canada-USA gold medal game!