Warning: It sounds great, but it's only good.
I mean, it's Hawaii, right?
Mrs. Brad and I recently spent 12 days on Moloka'i, made famous as that place Hawaiians with Hansen's Disease (leprosy) were sent from the 1866 until 1969 (10 years after Hawaii became a state!). That area is still populated and you can visit as part of a chaperoned tour, but that's just a small part of the island.
Here's what we knew about Moloka'i before going: It is sparsely populated (only about 7,000 people), there are only a few restaurants, one grocery store and two gas stations.
On the entire island.
Renting a condo near the beach was cheap (less than $100 per night). Fantastic, right? Kind of.
Our condo was in the private part of a hotel resort that went belly up (the hotel, restaurant and golf course were abandoned) in 2008, making it feel like a ghost town. The golf course largely returned to nature over the 14 years of benign neglect, leaving only cart paths. The boarded-up hotel rooms and restaurant felt something from a post-apocalyptic movie. There were maybe 40 people in a huge resort designed for hundreds, who reportedly paid upward of $400 per night to stay there in the 1990s.
Not now.
We learned a lot in our 12 days on Moloka'i. First of all, we discovered that all Hawaiian beaches aren't created equal. Beaches within walking distance of our condo were great, but the water was rough and choppy. Nobody seems to surf on Moloka'i and the few people on the beaches (most of the time, Mrs. Brad and I were the only people there) avoided the water because it was unpleasant.
We also learned that while we don't need nightclubs and trendy restaurants while on vacation, it's nice to have options. We ate four restaurant meals – three of them at a picnic table outside a hamburger place, one a to-go order from the island's only pizza parlor. Otherwise? Microwaved meals, cold cereal, polish dogs.
It was magnificent to have so much time to relax – my favorite vacation perk is the opportunity to nap whenever the desire strikes and having an open schedule. We each read several books, but learned that we need more than that.
Consider our normal schedule: Get up around 6:30 a.m. (no curtains in the condo, so it was light early) and relax for an hour. Then walk along the ocean on the deserted golf course for another hour. Then breakfast and a trip to the beach for three or four hours before coming home.
That made it about 1 p.m. After a shower, it was 1:30 p.m.
Having more to do would be helpful, even in paradise. Fortunately, we vacationed during the NBA playoffs, so there was a game at 2:30 p.m. or 3 p.m. every day so we watched that, ate dinner, then went walking again before sundown.
It was great.
Until it wasn't enough.
It's weird and seems ungrateful to say a Hawaii vacation wasn't great. It was great. It was relaxing and it was Hawaii!
But it was also informative: We learned that completely unscheduled time, with no options, isn't perfect.
It was trouble in paradise. But, again to be fair, it was in paradise.
Reach Brad Stanhope at bradstanhope@outlook.com.
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