Hawaii, the Big Island – Part 2

Disembarking at Ke-Ahole International (KOA)

After much prep work and packing, we boarded our United flight at SFO and took off shortly before two in the afternoon. The flight lasted about five hours, and crossed three time zones. All in all it was pretty uneventful, and let’s face it, that’s exactly what you want when you’re cruising along at 525mph at 36,000′ over the Pacific.

I managed to doze off for a grand total of ten minutes, but I always have trouble sleeping on planes. Instead I passed much of the time by reading the first half of the book I’d brought just for this purpose, Graham Greene’s The Quiet American.

Our landing at KOA was also uneventful and gave us our first look at this part of the island, which is mostly vast stretches of lava rock field. It was quite different than the other Hawaiian scenery that I had previously experienced on Oahu and Maui.

We had some issues with Budget when we went to pick up the rental cars. First, their computers were said to be down, and they were working off printouts. Second, the one employee that was there the whole time (two others showed up for a bit) was clearly trying to set some sort of record for how much time he could take to help a couple in front of us. Twice he meandered away casually into the lot to check and see if they had something available for them, leaving several of us standing in line for 5-10 minutes at a time in an otherwise empty rental lobby.

While waiting for the guy to finish one of his strolls, I excavated my camera from my carry-on bag and snapped a photo of the KOA airport tower, as the light beacon on the top as also benchmark TU2634. This would be my only benchmark find for the day.

When we finally got to the counter, we discovered that they had no record – printed, anyway – of our second car reservation. Fortunately, due to a miscommunication on our part, I’d actually made another reservation over at Hertz. After finally getting the Budget rental sorted, we went over to the Hertz lot where they processed us quickly and without any further drama.

From there it was about a twenty-minute drive to the timeshare at the resort area where we were staying. Our final challenge was locating the main lobby area to check in, which was complicated by the large multi-building complex having only a single street address. The GPS led us to the complex, but we had to drive past a half dozen buildings before we found the lobby. From there, we were able to easily locate and get settled into the second-floor condo… And we were finally relaxing in Hawaii!

Condo living room

Food had been ordered for the room, so we threw together some quick sandwiches and had those along with guava juice for dinner. We had our first comfortable experience of sitting out on the large lanai (big Hawaiian porch) in the warm evening air, and saw the first of the geckos that would visit each night. Time spent on lanai like this would become one of our fond memories of the trip.

Checking out the lanai

On the schedule for the following day – our first full day on the island – were my first Hawaiian geocache find (hopefully!), the petroglyph park trail and nearby beach… After as much relaxing and lounging about on the lanai as we could stand.

Lanai view