Maui: Wild Horses Couldn't Drag Me Away

My family returned from its first trip to the nation’s 50th state, Hawaii, specifically Oahu and Maui. Once upon a time ago in my early 20’s I had lived, for a forever seeming four months, in Honolulu, and returned afterwards on my honeymoon a decade ago. Back when I had briefly called myself a ‘kamaaina’ (local resident), Honolulu was far from the endless idyllic summer it may sound like today. Those months during the late 1980’s that I spent serving overly sweet cocktails to foreign tourists unaccustomed to tipping and limitless draft beers to drunken frat boys craning their necks for a better view of Sunday’s weekly ‘bikini contest’ entrants motivated me to return to the mainland and … attend law school so I would never, ever have to scrape by like that again. Living in so-called paradise was the embodiment of “great place to visit, wouldn’t want to live there.”

But that time long ago is another story.

Today’s story is about my 8 and 6 year old kids’ first visit to the mythological “Hawaii.”  Seeing the same city I had once lived in through my kids’ eyes was worth the price of admission. And make no mistake, Honolulu/Waikiki is a big city, a fact not lost on my 8 year old daughter, who wailed with palpable disappointment as we exited Honolulu’s airport and immediately hit rush hour traffic “It’s just like LA, mom.”

There’s nothing laid back about Waikiki, and certainly not the Hilton Hawaiian Village resort where we stayed. I’d been at the resort before and it had everything one could possibly want (including two onsite Starbucks). But most especially, it offered myriad pools for the kids, which they had been looking forward to all summer. Unfortunately, when I saw that each of the two main “whirlpools” (i.e., hot tubs) with a posted capacity of 9, contained instead over 20 bodies of all shapes and sizes huddled together almost touching and unwittingly exchanging goodness only knows what bodily fluids, another word ending in ‘pool’ entered my mind instead (okay, that word was cesspool). The majority of tourists I saw were Japanese nationals, for whom Hawaii, especially Oahu it seemed, is an easy family vacation destination. Indeed I heard more Japanese than English there and signs and menus were in both English and Japanese. But the silver lining – and I love finding these little jewels as often as possible – was that the sushi was really good!

Kids love water slides, too, and the Hilton Hawaiian Village didn’t disappoint on that front. No matter that the water was so cold I couldn’t stand it for more than 10 minutes without shivering visibly (how they did that is a mystery, excess ice cubes from the previous night, perhaps?). The sliding tubes ended in a big splash in the central pool and it was all my 8 year old daughter wanted to do. That and nightly grilled cheese sandwiches in the Tropics bar & grill were her heaven, coupled with strolling the shops for made-in-China Hawaiian-looking trinkets and for the perfect, multicolored Hawaiian dress that she would never again wear in LA. But she did learn to snorkel in the main pool, and spent a few hours methodically swimming from end to end, apparently fascinated by the pool’s concrete bottom (sorry, no tropical fish here, sweetie). She also loved the boogie board that some way-too-cool for Waikiki Italian tourists gave her on their last day. She took it to the beach outside the hotel and acted as if she didn’t live within a mile of another world-class beach and tourist destination, Santa Monica. Though I suppose the water off Waikiki was a calm, warm bathtub compared to the always bone-chilling (to me) and rough waves at Will Rogers State Beach. And then on our last night on Oahu, Saturday, as we all were swimming in the soft mellow waves and the sun was descending, she holding on to the precious boogie board, we saw a rainbow from one end of Waikiki to another. Kind of a nice touch that rainbow, don’t you think?

As for my 6 year old son, he was absolutely fascinated by the torches surrounding the resort that came alight every night as the warm, tropical dusk fell and looked forward to the nightly “fire lighting ceremony” described on the resort’s website. But he was equally enthralled by sleep, and being on LA time he tended to pass out by 7 p.m. -- which is when the lighting was to happen. It turned out the ‘ceremony’ had been discontinued years earlier – nevermind its inclusion in the current marketing materials -- but he was finally able to keep awake for the very last lighting that Saturday night. And let me tell you, Larry the Torch Lighter did not disappoint him. Larry’s job was to carry a burning torch and with it light each one around the resort like an Olympic runner carrying the eternal flame. Afterwards my son proclaimed Larry “really, really nice,” so nice that if he were a girl, my son said, he would want to marry Larry himself. Just to emphasize his point, he added that if I were not already married to his dad, that I should also (or instead? he wasn’t clear here) marry this Larry. I never did meet Larry personally – preferring to hang out with my daughter and watch her eat her grilled cheese while listening to whoever was playing Margaretville, Fire & Rain and Hotel California in the Tropics grill to chasing Larry and his running torch. Plus I doubted that Larry would light my fire in quite the same way he lit my son’s. (To anyone who’s still reading this – apologies - just couldn’t help myself.)

Have I mentioned yet that the music in Oahu was great? Different performers played at every single beachfront bar & grill nightly, and I could hear them, sometimes simultaneously, from the hotel room even if I was not down there myself because the kids had already expired. The music just floated on the air. Some were genuinely really good. One afternoon I heard a cover of the Rolling Stone’s Wild Horses as I sat on the balcony of the 13th floor with a view of Diamondhead and the Pacific. I hadn’t heard it in a long time, followed by Bob Dylan’s Like a Rolling Stone. They took me back to my ‘bohemian’ music phase during college, when I listened to nothing but Dylan, Joplin, Hendrix & the Doors (that may explain the previous bad pun -- I used to love that song.)  I thought about a lot of things in a jumbled way out on that balcony. Then I stopped thinking and just listened. It was infinitely better that way.

One night the family sat in Tropics with the almost asleep kids still getting used to Hawaii time, their dad and I silently listening to the strains of Stevie Nicks’ Leather and Lace sang by a young country singer (whose name I have unfortunately forgotten) who had been called up to join Henry Kapono, a truly superb Hawaiian Grammy nominated singer/songwriter/guitarist, while she was visiting the islands to play at Jimmy Buffet’s club later down the street. The two sang it as a duet, and I was spellbound -- music does that to me. I’ve since looked up Kapono and he’s been performing for over 35 years. I sat there thinking, hmmm, if you’re going to be revisiting the place of your honeymoon with kids in tow and spending the time with almost no conversation, for reasons quite different than the lack of conversation the first time around, this was not a bad place to do it. The breeze was blowing sweetly, the music consisted mostly of covers of well-known songs like old friends lending a hand and the kids slept like soft marble angels against their parents. Though I have to add that Kapono played originals too, especially one about the sun – I’m still on a mission to find that one somewhere.

So don’t misunderstand – Oahu and even Waikiki were amazing in their own touristy, fruity cocktail kind of way. When I lived there, I always referred to Oahu – officially nicknamed “the gathering place” -- as “the crowded isle” -- and I expected nothing less now. It was a wonderful experience, albeit crawling with people. And let’s not forget Larry’s burning torches lighting the sky on fire. Plus, there was a fireworks show on the last night that was quite spectacular if quick -- and loud – just ask my son who had been passed out peacefully until the boom shook him awake so dramatically he looked like a rag doll having a seizure. Waikiki was pretty nice.

But Maui, by contrast, seemed like a mystical paradise when we arrived for the second half of the 10 day trip. Along with the kids, it was also my first visit to “the valley isle.” We all agreed that this – not Oahu  -- was what the whole myth of “Hawaii” was about. It was beautiful there. The huge expanse of the mountains and the sea filled with lackadaisical surfers was so different from Waikiki’s almost Las Vegas-like always awake atmosphere.

We stayed at the Hyatt on Kaanapali Beach, which was wonderful because the beach’s edge was so close to the rooms that it only took a few minutes to reach. At the Hyatt, my daughter experienced a gigantic water slide in the dark after being coaxed into it by her dad. She reveled in the fact that she had conquered her fear, and he did too. Then both kids played together in the shallow children’s area while I watched them just out of the corner of my eye, unafraid that they could somehow drown in no more than a foot of water, and I could just let my mind roam all over the ancient towering volcanoes and deep oceans and back again. And the Hyatt’s hot tub – did I mention that? It contained not a single soul – nor, perhaps more importantly, a body! My son and I took a dip and he swam unimpeded from one end of the little pool to the other. It felt clean, not like the Ganges River of hot tubs back on Waikiki.

Although the live music at the Hyatt’s bar & grill, a restaurant named Umalu, wasn’t quite as good as the varied entertainers back on the crowded isle – one particularly uninspired group of musicians insisted on closing their set with You’ve Lost That Loving’ Feeling, played not once but twice in a row on the last night we were there --  which did nothing for anyone’s mood, let me tell you. But the place offered grilled cheese sandwiches for the kids and seared ahi salad that I returned to faithfully night after night while my son and his dad split the ahi burger or fish tacos. What more could you want from a family trip?

So putting the two almost disjoint parts of the vacation together, I would say that wild horses couldn’t drag me away from this true paradise  -- Maui.

But the kids’ first day of school could, and did, and so we all returned to the Palisades a bit tanner (unintentionally, for my part) and more relaxed for the effort.

Maui, I’ll be back.