Not Even Not Zen 427: Biomythography - Note 139: Old Pranks

Wikimedia,, Yann Segalen

 Laugh Like You've Got a Hotfoot

"That gal is driving like she's got a hotfoot," I said as we rolled up to a stoplight. Two cars over, a driver in a silver jeep was revving her engine.

"A what?" said my son.

"What was that?" My daughter shook her head. My wife spared me a puzzled glance. She raised her eyebrows as if doubtful of getting a reasonable expectation. Or maybe she suspected this was a sign of me going senile. 

It's an old phrase, for sure. But I was surprised to learn my wife and grown-up kids didn't know what a hotfoot was. Nobody pranks other people to that degree anymore, to the level where it's a low-grade assault. American humor has changed. Admittedly, for the better.

How To Do It

Find someone napping. Grab their shoe without waking them up or removing it from their foot. Stick matches in it. Light the matches. Walk away. Watch from a distance as the heat of the flame wakes them up.

Maybe they try to run from the blistering heat. The matches are firmly embedded in the shoe, remember. They can't get away. Hilarity ensues. They leap about like a court jester. Then they come to their senses, sit back down, and pull off the offending shoe.

By the time I was seven, I had heard kids talk about it. I had seen the prank carried out successfully once, on television in the visitors' dugout of a baseball game. One player had fallen asleep. Another player had given him a hotfoot. The camera caught the highjinx, the players and manager laughing at the victim of the joke. In the television booth, the commentators chuckled and slapped each other on the shoulder.

It looked like fun. Grown-up fun. Of course, I had to try it. You should try it, too.

But it's hard, when you're seven. You're not allowed to have matches. You have to steal them from the kitchen junk drawer, next to the gas stove. Then you have to find a friend, hold the matches in a fist behind your back, and tell him to go to sleep.

"Now?" he says. He's sitting on his front steps. He leans like he's considering resting his head.

"Yeah, of course."

"Why?"

When he won't sleep, you have to admit you wanted to try to hotfoot him. Then you both get involved in finding an appropriate pair of old shoes. You try the matches. They don't stick into the shoe right, not between the sole and the top of the shoe like you saw on television.

You break all the matchsticks trying to jam them in. Your friend gets a screwdriver to help the shoe have an appropriate hole. Back at your house, you steal more matches. You rush out to your friend. He has stolen a lighter from his father's cigarette tray. Together, you go to work on the shoe some more.

This time, the matches catch. And they do basically nothing. You try to burn the shoe, which your best friend took from his older brother's grass-mowing Keds. His brother had left them to dry in the basement. Even with the lighter held against a shoe, though, the moist canvas and the worn-down rubber won't burn. The best result you can get is melted rubber. And it's not much, either. You're making the soles of the Keds slightly warm and smooth.

"It doesn't work," Joe says. He's still your best friend. He's always willing to try.

"I saw it on television," you swear to him.

"Well, it's not doing anything." He continues to hold the lighter to the shoe. He's right. It's not burning.

How Different We Are

Not everybody carries matches, lighters, and tobacco, nowadays. No one tells ethnic jokes. We don't accept property destruction as a prank. Pushing someone downstairs is no longer funny. Chevy Chase falling downstairs is no longer funny. Actually, it never was. 

Gerald Ford falling down is still a little funny. But he was President.

 

Not Even Not Traveling 68: Hawaii - Oahu

In the morning, we arrived at our fourth stop, our third Hawaiian island, Oahu. Although Oahu is not the largest island in the chain, it's home to the most people, The state capital, Honolulu, sits on its southern coast.

On other islands, we landed in towns like Hilo, Kahului, Waila, and Kona. They seemed reasonably-sized - but not Honolulu. Because Honolulu was enormous.

A Comparison

When I vacationed with my wife in Chicago for a few days, many years ago, we wisely decided not to drive in the city. No one ever says, "Hey, what I want to do with my precious free time is fight the traffic in downtown Chicago." But that's the mistake we made with Honolulu. It's because I hadn't realized downtown Honolulu is basically Chicago, but moved to a nicer beach.

We went to pick up our rental car. Even getting to the site by taxi and on foot was a struggle through the crowds. Driving back out into the perpetual traffic jam of the downtown was almost impossible.

Another Comparison 

I have driven in New York City. It takes a special type of driver to do it in rush hour - basically, not me. You have to be assertive at a different level. My impression of Chicago traffic was similar, although as a tourist I could see it was a step below the intensity of New York. Honolulu, to my shock, competes at the Chicago level, albeit with more of a smile. The drivers have an aggressive downtown culture and, if you're going to drive with them, you need to watch and follow their unwritten rules about how close you can be, whose turn it is, and how much room to give pedestrians.

To make it extra stressful, I decided at the rental agency to make this the first time I drove a Toyota Prius. Now, they gave me five options. I picked the Prius deliberately. Immediately, I realized I was going to have regrets. The car had standard features and advanced configurations at the same time. It didn't have many built-in services but all of them it did have were engineered in a confusing way. I spent half an hour fighting for traffic position while struggling with the car's weird gear shift. Diane had to puzzle with the bluetooth at the same time. Plus, the car started with a 'Maintenance Needed' notice on the dashboard that never turned off.

Finally, A Sandy Beach

Eventually, we made it out of the city. The process was no fun but we broke free. We knew where we wanted to go: a park where we could rent equipment and go snorkeling. Diane had one picked out on her GPS. After twenty minutes more driving, we got there. Except we didn't, really. We couldn't park. They had the equipment shack. They had room in the ocean, sure. But the parking lot was closed.

We drove to our alternate destination, the Diamond Trail. A sign on the mountain there said the parking lot was full. Tourists had parked their cars along one side of the road, too, creating imaginary spots. There were no imaginary spots left.

So we kept driving. In time, we reached the southeast shore. There we found a docks area with an outdoor mall. We decided to have lunch at an Italian restaurant and look at our maps. I stared for a moment at the prices, though. The cheapest appetizer was twenty-five dollars. Of course, we ate anyway. We wanted to sit and figure out our next targets. Getting a table was also the only way to go to the bathroom. All the bathrooms in Honolulu and Waikiki were closed to non-customers.

During our lunch, Diane found another place to go snorkeling, then another. The businesses occupied spaces on the east bay. That meant we needed to keep driving. By this point, I was starting to resign myself to the time on the road but I was going stir crazy in the car. Lying prone in a bay gazing down at fish sounded wonderful.

The problem was, the next place was was closed due to lack of parking. And the next. We kept driving the loop of the main highway around the island and came down off the mountains to a place called Sandy Beach. There was no sign saying it was closed. I had to try it. Then, in the imaginary parking lot (there was a real, paved part but our part was a sand pit), I saw where I could make an extra imaginary space for our car. Diane pointed to a police car.

"They're not bothering anyone here so far," I countered. To be safe, when I saw someone pulling out, I snuck into their spot. Now we were just doing what the rest of the beach crowd was doing. In the Prius, we flopped around for a few minutes to get dressed for the surf. It wasn’t too hard because we had been ready to snorkel.

The beach was so nice that Diane felt the ocean touch her feet and said it was enough for her. She was done.

"I have to get in," I told her.

"I know you do," she replied. 

As I waded into the surf, teenagers kept telling me how “the waves were crazy” due to the storm on the other side of the island. Okay, fair. The waves were a lot taller than me. I'd never been here before, though. Maybe that was normal. 

It did not occur to me at the time that I am no longer fifteen years old. Body surfing was no problem for the first ten minutes. I rode a few waves successfully. But as I grew tired battling the waves and the undertows, it took more and more effort simply to survive failing to catch the waves (as the real surfers zoomed by) and eventually it took even more effort for me to recover from the pounding surf and sand and staying (mostly) upright.

Oh, the undertows. There were two, one moving north, another southeast. They met where the waves were the best, so of course that's where I wanted to be (along with everyone else). Thankfully, the crowd wasn't big and the surfers dodged through the swimmers with skill. The surfing area was bounded on the south side by sharp, volcanic rocks. So we were limited in how far we could spread out.

After the thirty-fourth surfer sped by me through the crowd, a magic timer went off in my mind/body saying, “that’s enough.” I had been thrashed in the surf for most of an hour. Diane deserved however much time it took for me to accompany her on a trip through the tidepools. 

To the south, we thought tidepools were nice enough. Getting dry and figuring out where to go next was okay, too. Half a day later, though, it occured to me that only teenagers had surfed in those waves. And me. I think the oldest person aside from me in the water at Sandy Beach was about twenty-five. Most of the others were in high school. I had been older than the boogie boarders, surfers, and body surfers by about forty years. They probably weren't telling me the surf was crazy because of the storm. They were, as politely as they could, telling me I was crazy.

Anyway, the tide pools really were nice. As we clambered back into the car, we glanced to the southwest and saw storm clouds. We gazed north and saw only sunshine in Waikīkī. 

Friendship Garden

Diane searched her phone for attractions. At this point, she was looking for almost anything: museums, parks, beaches, hiking trails, luaus, whatever looked open to the public. And we tried. We meandered along main and side roads to each spot. Some looked beautiful. At each and every one, though, the parking lot was full. When there was imaginary parking, that was taken, too.

Hawaiians on Oahu are comfortable with making their own spaces. However, I think they balk at rolling over the curb and into the park. None had done it, anyway, or I would have tried.

After five more failures, Diane found a place called Friendship Garden where the parking was described as “limited.” Given how things were going for us at sites with a hundred places to park (but all full), I figured we had no chance at Friendship Garden. It was a hiking destination, though. That’s something we have loved to do in these past few years. We were close, just ten minutes away. We had to try. 

The GPS took us off the main highway onto a side road north of Waikiki, in Keana. Next, it told us to turn into a housing development. It guided us up switchbacks in the development. Then we took a small road, one car wide, up a lonely mountain into exclusive, gated estates. Soon the path grew more tilted than anything in San Francisco. And it remained obviously private.

“Is this park accessible through someone’s house?” I joked. But my sarcasm turned out not to be entirely wrong.

Diane responded with a description of the nature trail. She read from an attractive paragraph supplied by her map. We could walk about a mile on a little mountain, under the shade. 

“You have reached your destination,” the GPS intoned. Diane waved it around.

“Stop! Stop!” She rose out of her seat.

“Do you see anything?” We paused on the road with estate walls to our left and a spacious, cast iron gate to our right. 

“No.” She slumped down again.

Down the slope to the right, which was the north side, we could see a mansion with its own vineyard. It didn’t look anything like a hiking spot. Next to the estate walls, two cars had occupied the only imaginary spaces available. I pressed the pedal down. The Prius rolled on.

In a quarter mile, the mountain trail ended in a loop. So the one lane road we were driving must have been able to accommodate two cars in opposite directions at least some of the time. We looped and headed back down, defeated. 

“You have reached your destination,” the GPS intoned. Diane sat up. And in front of us, a young man and a woman crossed the road from the mansion to one of the two cars in the imaginary spaces. Now I could see the spaces lay on a semi-paved shoulder. The shoulder looked designed to provide sewer access. I could see a round sewer plate on one side, in the shadows underneath a big truck. The young couple hopped in their brown sports car behind the truck and pulled out. We watched them roll down the hill in front of us.

“Pull in, pull in!” She held up her phone with the GPS blinking green at the bottom. “Let’s get out and look around.” 

I was cramped from driving. Stretching my legs sounded great. So I swung into the muddy gravel of the topmost spot. As I did, the truck in front, which apparently had a driver sitting in it who I hadn't noticed, started to pull away. The movement revealed the round sewer plate entirely. There was asphalt around the sewer plate. It looked like better parking so I rolled forward. I cut the engine and pulled the emergency brake.

“We’re here,” Diane announced as she got out.

“Well, we’re somewhere.” I stood up straight and closed my door behind me.

“No, I mean come around to this side of the car.”

When I walked around, I saw to my surprise that Diane was pointing to a placard. It read, in small but unmistakable letters, 'Friendship Garden.' In half a minute, we discovered another sign, one chiseled in stone. It had lay hidden by vegetation and, formerly, it had been blocked by the truck. I scratched my head as I thought. 

Two spots. That was the extent of the public parking. And we had just gotten one.

Well, Friendship Garden was worth the trouble. We wandered up the path and found a gazebo with pamphlets inside, describing the hike routes. The place turned out to be a large, private reserve although it was technically open to the public. (It had those two spaces.) Obviously, the locals of the neighborhood had to be the main users of these footpaths. The best source of access was a stroll up the road; otherwise, visitors had to depend on their luck with the uncertain parking.

To our shock, as we marched up a slope, we met a young woman coming down. She did not look happy to see us. She scowled as if we had invaded her private space. 

Friendship Garden is a ten-acre park, more or less. It occupies a mountain peak high enough to give a view of Kaneohe Bay, provided visitors climb half a mile to it. On its paths, hikers pass long stretches of trees, flowers, and birds. Some of the trees are Cook Pines. And that's weird. I found it odd and unsettling to see pine trees invading a tropical forest. New settlers to the islands must have planted the trees about a hundred and fifty years ago, from the look of them. The name 'Cook' pines is probably a clue. 

The Kokokahi Tract, the residential development outside the boundaries of the park, was developed in 1927 as a multi-ethnic community. Kokokahi was based on a Christian belief in the brotherhood of mankind. Its name translates to “one blood,” and amounts to a statement of its multi-ethnic purpose, which ran contrary to the prevailing segregation on the island at the time.

Not long after we started out, a bevy of college-aged kids started climbing up. We heard them park down below, a faint slam of car doors and excited, young voices. To our surprise, though, at about the halfway point on the trail, we got passed by someone different. A man who seemed to be walking his dog caught up to us. We stood aside to let him pass. Before we reached the summit, the college group passed us, too, where we stopped beside a pagoda to look at the Asian-style masonry.

At the top, we found ourselves surprised by the view of Kaneohe Bay. It really was beautiful in a way we hadn't expected, or at least I hadn't. The college kids were making a lot of noise, shouting to one another and fooling around by the side of a tree-lined cliff. One of the youngest ran up to us and beamed a white-toothed smile.

"Want us to take your picture?" he said. 

And so, at the top, we got a picture of us with a bit of the Kaneohe Bay in the background.
 

Not Even Not Traveling 67: Hawaii - Hilo

Wednesday, December 24

It was our arrival day in Hawaii. Specifically, we were docking in Hilo, a big city on the big island (the one actually called Hawai'i). It was also Diane's birthday.

This can be a tough day, sometimes. I usually feel like I'm not doing enough to make the day special. Fortunately, when we got a network connection, Diane's friends started chipping in with birthday wishes and I could tell she was relieved not to be forgotten.

We are lucky, nowadays, to receive so much affection over such distances. 

Diane and I ate breakfast in our suite. I was feeling ill and feverish, so I skipped my workout, confident that walking around the island on our excursions would make up for it. Diane planned for us to skip the HollandAmerica tours of Hilo anyway. We had rented a car with the idea that we'd make our own excursion itinerary. We could tour the island of Hawai'i, yes, but at our own pace.

"What are you most interested in seeing?" she asked me.

"The volcano park."

"Anything else?"

"Nature stuff. One of the botanical gardens." No one wants to see yet another city on vacation. Well, that might be just me. When it's a city with entertaining differences and great bookstores, like Portland, I can see some appeal to it. Mostly, though, I want to understand the land I'm visiting. There's nothing better than seeing the land itself or what's left of it, untouched or at least, unpaved. 

Diane wanted to see Rainbow Falls. Fine my me. For my part, I had memories of hiking to weird plants I wouldn't normally see. Visits to places like the Desert Botanical Garden in Phoenix were great, so I was the lookout for more like it. We found a promising attraction on the route between the Rainbow Falls and the National Volcano Park - the Pana'ewa Rainforest Botanical Garden and Zoo. It's apparently the only U.S. park located in an actual rainforest. Weird plants, I thought; so that's probably interesting. 

As usual, the spontaneously planned part of our day proved to be the best part. Rainbow Falls was nice enough, although Great Falls on the Potomac is nicer. Our final destination, the National Volcano Park was good because I found the steam vents fascinating. But the zoo we dropped by between those sites was the best. And it didn't even have weird plants.

Hawaii Has Coffee Girls

After the Rainbow Falls, we turned into a strip mall. I was looking for coffee. Diane found a place on her GPS called Coffee Girls. It was pink. The coffee was great. This is recommended, actually.

Hawaii Has Goats

As we turned onto the main drive into Pana'ewa Rainforest, three animals burst across the road. They dashed from trees on my left into the grass on my right, then trotted downslope into a tree-covered stream. We saw them for a few seconds, a small, white goat, a larger, brown goat, and another animal, maybe a donkey. (You would think I could recognize the difference between a donkey and a goat or a sheep but it was fast. And it was grey. And it had four legs.) 

At the time, I thought the three animals had escaped from the zoo. After seeing goats during every excursion in Hawaii, though, I realized that Hawaii simply has a lot of wild goats.

Pana'ewa Rainforest

We arrived fifteen minutes early. We bought our tickets. We waited. Eventually, the gate guard told us, "Go ahead." He waved us through the park entrance, which made us detour through the gift shop. As we walked out of the shop onto the zoo paths, we paused. The grounds were eerily quiet. We were the first and only tourists. After a minute or two, we heard someone say, "Hello."

I glanced around. There were no people in view.

"Hello." Thirty feet away, a macaw stood on a perch in a cage. It was staring at me.

"Hello," it said. 

"Hey, they've got a 'Hello Bird!'" I had no idea what a macaw was. It looked like a big, colorful parrot, mostly red with a bit of green and blue on its head. Also, it had a job. No professional greeter at a retail store did this better. 

"Hello." It spoke again as I approached. I read the plaque beneath its perch, which told me about the type of bird.

"You've got a big beak," I said.

"Hello."

"Well, that's enough of that."

"Hello."

So it wasn't much of a conversationalist. Still, it was pretty cool. I felt like we had already gotten a benefit from arriving early on December 24. We had only ourselves and the animals in this rainforest. We could give ourselves a private tour.

Well, the rainforest wasn't much. I dutifully read the display boards telling me what was what. There wasn't a lot to see. The paved zoo path and the cages had knocked back the jungle. Only in a handful places did we encounter swaths of green lushness. At one of those, a sign told us it wasn't part of the native rainforest but, instead, a grove of foreign transplants.

The animals, in contrast, each had distinct personalities. We saw a dark swan at its meal, surrounding by golden carp roiling the surface of the pond. Each fish attempted to help itself to the crumbs spilled by the swan. As we walked through a section of rainforest, we heard a hidden, native bird that sounded like a rave club electronics track. It sang just the highest end of a human hearing range, but it hit notes on a descending scale.

We found a white tiger roaming through an acre of grass. She flopped down in the sun for a moment. We walked to our left around her, watching. She rolled on her back and exposed her belly. In a pen behind her, we noticed an orange tiger, pacing. Someone had placed the orange one in a prison, essentially. It paced exactly like a prisoner, too, one who had spent too much time in solitary confinement.

"Maybe that one misbehaved?” Diane suggested as she studied how it was confined. Her idea seemed right. If one tiger had attacked or harassed the other, the zookeepers might have needed to cage the aggressor. There would have been no other good reason, in fact, so we hoped it was something like that.

Farther south on the trail we met more caged birds. The sign said we were looking at an alala. However, the alala remained quiet and tried to hide. Apparently, it's a type of Hawaiian crow that went extinct in the wild. So we were seeing one of the handful remaining. Fortunately, local Hawaiians had started a project to reintroduce the alala in the wild. The program was just then starting to show signs of success. Our bird looked like he remained doubtful.

A little further on, a grey crowned crane stared at us like we had forgotten to bring the coffee. (True enough.) It barely blinked. Crowned cranes all look like mad scientists after a long night because they have spiky heads, a bit like English punks but also like Doc Brown in Back to the Future. They've got wild, bewildered eyes, too.

At one of the fences with a big “animal bites” warning sign, an emu trotted over to meet Diane as she approached. The giant birds got an acre of grass to roam in, like the tigers. I waited for Diane to try to pet the emu but she wisely did not. I think the bird was waiting for that, too.

At the lemur cage, we met animals like the ones in the Madagascar movie. They didn't dance but they had pretty (and recognizable) physiques and fur markings. They turned their butts to us, totally unbothered by their first customers of the day at the zoo.

Farther on, we met two binturong. I hadn't seen any before. The smaller and stronger binturong lazed on a branch in the middle of the cage. Another name for this type of animal is 'bearcat' and I could see why. It was about the size of a lynx but with fur like a bear. Although it seemed strong and tough, it relaxed like an opportunity hunter - basically, like a cat. This particular binturong had a surly expression as it ignored us, half-sleeping. I felt as if we were watching a furry Clint Eastwood in a spaghetti western. This time, he was playing a character who refuses to get up from the couch, lazy but dangerous.

Along the southwestern zoo path, we found monkeys of many types. Each one disdained us in their own unique way. Some showed us their butts. Some got up front and relaxed in exaggerated poses, slumping as if to make it clear they didn't worry about us at all. A few remained preoccupied with the bars of their cage. Others played with their favorite toys.

At some point, I turned a corner and discovered albino peacocks. Diane had mentioned them, I thought, when we had each gone separate directions briefly and then reunited. Here they were, in their big cage. Although there were two of them, they looked rare and expensive, like designer editions of this year's top-end model. As I studied the pair, I became aware of motion to my right. I turned to see what it was and spotted a regular peacock, actually a peahen, strutting free. It wasn't in a cage. Rather, it was roaming the paved zoo paths like a tourist. When my gaze fell on it, the bird held motionless for a moment. It gave me a sidelong glare, as if I had interrupted its visit to its albino relatives and I was the one who didn't belong.

Maybe the peahen came to check out the albino peacocks every day. She treaded around me, behind and to my left, where she could get a better view of her caged relatives.

"There are more," said Diane. She saw me and stepped close. "I've seen at least two others."

In fact, there were half a dozen free-roaming peahens. We saw them at a distance, sitting in groups of two or three, or we found them in the underbrush along the paths as we visited the smaller animals like the swimming turtles, poisonous frogs, snakes, fish, salamanders, and axolotl. 

This was the first axolotl I've seen in real life.

Volcano Park

Back at the Pana'ewa Zoo, the day had been warm, for December. The sky had been intermittently cloudy and bright. When we drove up to the top of Mount Kīlauea, though, we met a different sort of weather. At this elevation, the day was a cold and rainy. And it was still December, of course.

Normally, people can stand on the edge of the volcano caldera and see across it. On this day, no one could. Sure, we could stand in the wind and rain. But we couldn't see through the swirling mists. The air turned grey and opaque in the distance. 

We could still see a quarter of a mile, maybe. It simply wasn't far enough to do more than make out faint, silver shapes halfway across the caldera. On the national parks app, we saw we had just missed an eruption warning. We'd been lucky in that respect. People had been allowed back in. Also, the steam vents in the caldera were billowing at their fullest and probably their hottest, too. But the wind on the rim gusted at high speeds. It was loud. It blew the rain into people's faces from unexpected directions. It billowed the tourist raincoats, knocked down umbrellas, spat moisture into every sleeve, every cuff, and down the backs of anyone who left part of their neck exposed.

Now, I was unaccountably happy about this. I enjoyed the weather. Yes, it was December. So what? It was Hawai'i. I could have hiked around the mountain for hours. However, I could see everyone else's faces around me. They all were miserable. Adults with children were already cranky, of course. So were their children. So were teenagers. Instagram posters gave the world a bitter glare. College students, usually the hardest to faze, gave their friends surly glances. People looked exhausted by the wind and rain. 

After an hour of hiking from place to place around the rim, Diane remarked to me, "I'm not enjoying this as much as I thought I would."

As I've mentioned, I have a great emotional immune system, immune to all sorts of hints. But even I caught this one.

"Let's get to someplace with trees," I suggested. I grabbed the brim of my hat as another gust tried to carry it away.

"Out of the fucking wind."

"Um, yes." Although I liked the wind and enjoyed the sight of tourists in plastic raincoats getting caught in the gale, I knew it wasn't enough to entertain Diane. Even when she cackled as she watched a fashionista in a yellow, see-through raincoat turn the wrong way and explode, suddenly, into a crystal sphere of surprise, it wasn't enough. 

"There have to be better hiking locations somewhere around," she muttered. 

Off we marched, back to the tourist center and back into our car. 

Timing: don't go to Volcano Park at two in the afternoon like we did if you want to see the Lava Tube Caves. We decided the tubes should be our next stop but, alas, we did not make it in. We were not even close to getting a slot. The parking lot had filled to overflowing, probably hours before. Park police were shooing drivers away from trying to find a spot in there. We dutifully moved on. But the site after it was full, too. And the next. Tourists who couldn't get into the lava tubes were settling for the sites close by. We had to keep driving. We couldn't get into the petroglyph sites, either. We looped around for miles. Eventually, between our park map and our sense of where we would find a good hike, we navigated to one of the more remote locations, the Hillina Pali Overlook. Sure enough, we found parking and, not far away, a hiking trail through groves of trees sheltered from the wind and rain.

We couldn't stay protected for all the miles, of course. Sometimes we climbed barren slopes of volcanic ash, pumice, and basalt, When we did, though, I still liked being out in the weather. 

"How are we doing for time?" Diane asked at a distant point in the trail. 

"It's pretty late. We'll have to head back soon." We needed to drive back to the city of Hilo. After we returned the rental car, we'd have to hike downhill to the docks and re-board the Zaandam for dinner.

"I think I want to call 'pumpkin.'" This is her short-hand term for, 'the magic of this is wearing off and my enchanted coach is turning back into a pumpkin.' Sometimes, when we're at a party, she'll turn to me, whisper 'pumpkin,' and I'll know it's getting late and she's tired. It works on hikes, too. 
 

Not Even Not Traveling 66: Hawaii - Arriving in San Diego

Flying There and Being There

We planned and packed. We rose before dawn. We slept as we flew. Suddenly we were in San Diego and I was talking about computers with our Turkish-American immigrant Uber driver.

It turned out he had written a program to places calls for the Uber / San Diego Airport waiting list. After months of trouble-shooting, he got his hardware and software right. He started getting the best possible spot in the Uber ride list. Other drivers noticed. They wanted in. Now he offers his software as a paid service. The other drivers pony up to get the best spots in the Uber ride list for the airport. So we talked about his software for a while but also hardware. I asked questions about his design and I agreed he had implemented the failover correctly. I couldn't validate the load balancing just by his description but I had to say his app performance sounded like he'd done things right. (Also, I made sure he said he had offline backups and he'd tested them.)

Now our Uber driver was getting his main income from his app. His driving had become his side gig. It was very cool. His scheduler could probably expand more. Due to the way scheduling is different in different airports, he would need a server pair per area but still, that would be fun.

He's got an active mirror, a backup, and he's keeping up with the increased load of his customer base. He's doing it all with homegrown equipment. Also, he was a fun driver.

Segway Tour of San Diego

At our hotel, we checked in early. The staff was nice. We wanted to drop our bags and bolt. We didn't have much time in San Diego and Diane wanted to see as much as she could. She had scheduled a full afternoon of tours. First came our segway ride.

Amy was the tour guide. She's a Navy vet who spent most of her military tour in San Diego. She mustered out in the city. Now she proved able to tell us about the history of San Diego, how the harbor was discovered and named twice by different explorers; how the downtown was a scrub-brush desert; and how none of the plants we saw were local. The last part shocked me a little. San Diego looks lush. Every tree and flower was deliberately imported.

Opinion: Balboa Park was the best part of the tour. We entered over the Cabrillo Bridge, a narrow two-lane road that's more friendly to pedestrians than cars. Inside, we got to see how the park hosts museums, theatres, gardens, biking trails, and of course the San Diego Zoo, the most popular zoo in the country. One of the museums, in there is the Comic-Con Museum. (We did not drive into that one on our segways.) Balboa hosts the San Diego Air & Space Museum, Automotive Museum, History Center, a Model Railroad Museum, the San Diego Museum of Art, and the San Diego Natural History Museum. You could spend a week just visiting the park.

A woman named Kate Sessions started the park, at least according to Amy. Sessions gave her plant nursery to the city, then she donated trees and exotic flowers every year. She's responsible for a lot of the plant life in San Diego. In 1915 and in 1935, the park hosted International Expos; some of the park architecture comes out of the preparation efforts of those. Then in World War II, the U.S. Navy took over the park and made it into a training ground and barracks. (They gave it back.) This is an intensely varied and worthwhile place.

Kayaking Tour of La Jolla

We discovered a few hidden factors involved in a kayaking trip in La Jolla in December.

• It's chilly (see: December)
• The previous kayakers complained to our faces about not having wetsuits
• The tour guides all had wet suits
• And we could rent wet suits

So we rented them. More properly dressed than I'd planned, I pushed-launched our two-person kayak into the waves. I had help from Tumas, our guide. Tumas hailed from Toronto, he said, not San Diego. He had gone to school in the U.S. and decided to get his green card so he could settle in the United States.

Diane and I paddled out into the deeps. Tumas promptly steered his kayak to stay in position between us and the shore. Apparently, most of the problems on the tour have come from kayakers straying too near the rocks.

Tumas pointed out leopard sharks beneath us but, to be honest, I only saw a few ripples and flitting, darkish shapes. Instead, I spotted bright orange fish around us. Those were garibaldi. They didn't dart around. They hung out and nibbled on rocks like stoners nibbling on crumbs from the couch, unwilling to move.

We were the only ones moving (except for another ripple that Tumas said was a seal). The main site we wanted to see in at La Jolla was a series of caves below the cliffs along the shore. The sun was already low. We wanted to get into the caves before it got dark. We weren't allowed to bring cameras in the kayak but trust me when I say the caves were, well, okay. Not breath-taking. Not astounding. They're nice if you like weird light and seaweed. And history. During prohibition, gangsters used the caves for smuggling barrels of alcohol, which they brought in on rowboats.

Back outside the caves, we saw a cloud of diving birds. They had formed a hunting flock, which our guide called a 'kettle.' The kettle consisted of cormorants, pelicans, and a few seagulls teaming up to pick off individual fish from a school in the shallows. The cormorants and pelicans seemed to be having success.

Then at my request, we kayaked southward toward a roost of sea lions. We could see thirty of them. Close on the north side, we saw a couple males threatening each other. Males weigh maybe 1200 to 1400 pounds. They are loud and territorial. They establish their positions on the rocks; a few females join; and that's their social order. Trouble starts when a male encroaches on another's territory.

Two of the males were mad. Our guide moved his kayak between them. The biggest sea lion howled. He swam toward Tumas's kayak. He picked up speed for a charge. Then he dove under the water. A minute later, he popped up somewhere else.

"They're pretty cool, aren't they?" said Tumas.

"Yes." That's why I wanted to get close. I wouldn't have gotten between them, though.

"Notice they don't eat the garibaldi?"

"Yeah. Why not?"

"Garibaldi don't poop like other fish. They excrete waste through their skin."

I thought about it for a second and said, "They must taste terrible."

"Yeah!" He smiled at the thought.