Who's a Fat Bastard - Squatch Lobster

June 29, 2014

     I woke up in the middle of the night with a burning pain on my back, not in my back, on my back. If you read my last blog you saw the pictures from our snorkeling adventure. I always wear a shirt when I swim for a couple of reasons. 

     First I am Scottish, as a child my hair was white and my skin translucent. I could sunburn using an easy bake oven.

Second, I am embarrassed by my mantitty/moobs. And now, with the loss of thirty some pounds, I have developed a marsupial like pouch at the bottom of my still ample belly. I don't know what I was thinking.

     No shirt for the hour I was in the condo pool. Then for some totally unfathomable reason, I took my shirt off to snorkel for ninety minutes. This was the result. Squatch Lobster!!

Squatch Lobster

Red, Red Spine

     It kept me up most of the night. Every time I moved it hurt like hell. This picture doesn't do my pain justice, I am as red as a cooked lobster! I swore to never take my shirt off again. I could hear the guy trimming his nose hairs at the pool cheer.

     Not one to let something as small as lobster back slow me down. I insisted we get out there and snorkel. I made myself breakfast, a nice sausage, onion and cheese omelet. 

Omelet

     We loaded up the cooler with frozen bottles of water, hard boiled eggs, lettuce, ham and assorted fruits. Sunday in Kona is insane! Everywhere you looked there were people looking for parking. We weren't concerned. We were headed twenty-five miles out of town to a spot that everyone said was the best snorkeling. What they didn't tell us was that there was a festival going on today. State troopers had people parking four miles away up on the highway. No problem. It's the Big Island of Hawaii, there must be a hundred beaches. Using our GPS we found one another fifteen miles up the road. We found parking right at the beach. Most of the beaches we've been on this trip have been rocky or black sand. Mostly rock. The water is beautiful and the fish and stuff great, but the beach part is pretty lame. 

     I can't remember the name of the beach. Hawaiian names are hard. They have a lot of vowels and not enough consonants. If it starts with a K I call it Kumoniwanalaya, if it's an H it's Huminahuminahumina and if it's an L it's Lululugie. This particular beach was a K and had real sand coloured sand! It also had a papaya tree that had some ripe fruit on it. 

Add caption

Lisa had tried to shake some off to no avail. When she told me I went to the tree and gave it a Squatch shake.

Nice Papayas... the fruits not bad either

We added the two papayas to our cooler and started to check out the beach. There were lots of tidal pools with small fish and things. We saw a couple of kids with nets in one of the larger pools. They caught a Snowflake Eel about three inches long. It's white with black spots on it. 

These things grow to three feet!

A lot of the pictures didn't turn out because it was so bright, and I couldn't see the LED to check them. We explored the pools for half an hour. I then went for a swim, fully clothed! Hat glasses and all.

All dressed up and nowhere to go!

This beach had a good mix of sand and rocks. Most people were swimming though there were a few snorkelers on the outside rocks. I swam around for about twenty minutes while Lisa continued to check out the tidal pools. When I came out of the water I went to the showers they had on the beach to rinse off.       I brought a change of clothes, so I peeled off the shirt I was wearing, rinsed it off and wrung it out. A woman I had seen snorkeling out on the rocks came up to rinse off and said to me

"Apple cider vinegar will take care of that burn. It stings like hell at first, but then will feel better"

" You lost me at stings like hell" I said. " It's already feeling better" Lisa came up and started a conversation with her about the snorkeling. She told us the visibility wasn't that good but better than it has been. She said the snorkeling was better up north. Where we had just come from. We decided to continue south looking for a better beach. I never went into the water again! I put on the shirt I brought for just that reason and we were off. I realised that I had left my handkerchief in my pocket while swimming. 

     Bathing suits dry fast. Cotton handkerchiefs, not so much! I squeezed out the excess water. I then held it out the window and it was dry in about a minute. I have a wet shirt on the floor in the back seat....hmmmm. My giant shirt is considerably heavier than my handkerchief. By putting my arm through the arm holes of my wet shirt I wasn't going to lose it on the highway. It took about four minutes to dry and about four hours for my arm to recover. Think of a flag fluttering in the wind. Now think of that wind moving at sixty-five mph! Thank goodness it was lunch time.

     We needed gas, and since we were beachless, we decided not to eat our packed lunch. Besides, the highway runs a long way from the beach in most spots and is dull and dusty. Ten minutes later we found a gas station and an L & L Hawaiian Barbecue. Voted the best on the Big Island. I don't know who voted for this, but whoever it was they like their BBQ deep fried with rice, eggs and gravy! A lot! Lisa and I both ordered the BBQ combo. Short ribs, beef teriyaki and Korean chicken. Still no BBQ. Lisa had it regular, rice and macaroni salad. I had it with a green salad. It was quite good.

Lisa lunch

Squatch lunch

     After lunch we had  a decision to make. Head north the way we had come, or south towards the ominous black clouds. After a short debate, that I lost, we continued south. The sun was shining and our bellies were full. We had a rock station on the radio and all was good with the world. We stopped at a coffee place because of the sign. The southern most coffee shop in the U.S.A

They also sold Orchids.

Also a delicate flower

Not a mile down the road, " Stop the car Lisa, stop the car!" she skids to a halt on the shoulder of the road. I couldn't believe my eyes. I did not expect to see this in Hawaii.

A couple of Bison and some Big Horny Cows!

     We saw a sign for Green Beach and Southern beach. Why not?

We went to southern beach first. It was a typical Big Island beach. No sand. Lots of sharp lava rocks and wild surf.

Beauty on the beach

     We left there and headed over to Green Beach. It has sand, green sand caused by volcanic activity. It was a three mile hike into the beach, or we could pay a guy thirty bucks to drive us in with his 4x4. That's when it started raining. We never took another picture!

     When we got back out to the highway we saw a sign that said Kona, where the condo is, 73 miles, Hilo, the exact opposite direction of the condo, 46 miles. After a brief debate, that I lost, we headed for Hilo in the pouring rain. I had taken our paper map into the condo so we were running on memory because the GPS wanted to take us back the way we came. Evidently we both suffer from sometimers, sometimes we don't know where the hell we are!

We thought we would see downtown Hilo and maybe stop for dinner. At 7:00 on a Sunday night, that was a non starter. The place was a ghost town. Luckily Lisa knows a short cut. Lisa's short cuts usually make us late for wherever we are heading. We had no where to be, and since it was getting dark and still raining we headed to where we believed Highway 200 was located. Eleven miles out of town we found Highway 220. Maybe we have the number wrong? Half a mile up 220 it turned the wrong way. We turned around and were headed back to the main road when Lisa stopped and asked a woman where 200 was. Turns out it's called Saddle Road and runs through downtown Hilo. We drove back to Hilo found the road and headed for home. Highway 200 goes across the middle of the island, from the south east to the north west. We went from sea level to 6855 feet and back down to sea level and the temperature went from 72 degrees and raining to 54 degrees and then to 82 degrees when we got back to the condo.

     I don't find the scenery on the Big Island very interesting or the beaches as nice compared to Kauai, but I love the ocean here. When you can get to it. I'm glad we came home the way we did. It was much quicker than the Belt Road we took Friday. 

     In summation, We spent nine hours in the car, ninety minutes on two beaches and twenty minutes in the water. Not what I had in mind for today but still, not a bad day.

That's all I got.

Till next time

Peace out Y'all 

©2014 Dave Squatch Ward

Who's a Fat Bastard - A history of Hawaii

June 28, 2014

     It's 10pm and it's still eighty degrees. I woke up at 7:30 and it was eighty degrees. It turned out that was the coolest it was going to be all day. I stepped out onto the lanai and was hit by a wave of humid air that took my breath away. I was sweating like a water sprinkler in seconds. The sweat was literally squirting out of me! Then just to start my day off with a minor stroke, a gecko ran right across my toes. It's only four inches long but I screamed like Godzilla was living on the porch!

Squish the lizard!

 He ran across my toes and right up the wall into the gutters. I think I'll name him/her Squish. Because if it happens again he/she will be.

     Lisa had a yogurt, a banana and half a road kill avocado. I had

the other half and a couple of cheese dog wraps. 

Road kill avocado

Breakfast?

I had a quick shower because I was headed to the pool to cool down. We haven't used the pool yet. I wasn't even sure where it was. We found it right beside the ocean. Lisa wanted to go down to the waters edge and I wanted to get into the pool. She got part way down and realised that flip flops may not be the ideal footwear on the rocks.

Death defying flip flops

  She came back and got the keys so she could go get her adventure shoes. I went swimming. It must have been 90 degrees now. She came back and gave me the keys, you need the key to get on the shore, took the camera and was gone . I checked on her every once in a while, but basically she was gone for an hour. Lisa always seems to find interesting things when she is on the shore. 

Loving the view

I checked on her from the pool every once in a while. She was always crouched down poking at or taking a picture of something or other.  

I'll be in the pool!

I did my four stair stretch on the pool deck.The concrete is hard on the heels! Five sets of twenty alternate arm reaches. No sit ups because I was alone, also no pictures because Lisa had the camera. No way I was doing crunches on that concrete, I lay one of the recliners flat, put down a towel and did ten sets of twelve. There was an old guy trimming his nose hairs with a hand held mirror on the second floor watching me. That's the truth! I swear I heard him laugh. By the time I was done, you would think I had already been swimming. I was dripping wet and steaming hot. Peeled off my shirt and rolled into the pool. I swam laps for about twenty minutes till Lisa showed up.

Loving the condo!

We have a pretty good waterproof camera, so we were goofing off in the pool taking pictures of each other underwater. 
I call it the Mermaid and the Blowfish. Guess which one I am?

The little Mermaid

Who you calling Blowfish?

 Back to the condo for a shower. They put so much chlorine in the pool, I smelled like an airport urinal! 
     We packed a cooler with frozen bottles of water, and a couple of unfrozen ones as well, fired up Sparky for a stop at the Sally Anns. I need a book. It took so long to get here, I read both I had with me on the way. I buy a lot of books from them and today was half price day! One dollar for two books! A Grisham I haven`t read and a Lee Child, Jack Reacher novel. I just need to get Tom Cruise as Reacher out of my head. 
     From there, we drove aimlessly along the shore, air conditioning on stun, looking for a beach. The people we rented the condo from had told us that the Sheraton had a great beach and turtles. We parked and went to the Public access part of the beach. It was about twenty yards of jagged lava rock surrounded by Hotel guests only and no trespassing signs! Mahalo Sheraton!
     Sparky said the outside temperature was now ninety-two degrees. About 2 miles down the road we saw a beach with sand. A  seemingly unique thing on the Big Island. When you do find a sand beach, the sand is very coarse and mixed with Lava rock. Makes your feet feel great! This was a good choice The water was full of fish and we saw a few Sea Turtles too.

Fish

Not fish

Fish

Not Fish!

Fish

Not fish

I was close enough to touch the turtle. I don't know if you're supposed to touch them...but I did. His shell was slippery with algae and felt really hard. He didn't even stop grazing. We were in the water for a couple of hours. I was so wrinkled I could have passed for a foreskin!
     We were cutting it close. We had to be at the Fairmont Orchid for a Luau with Nin and Krista and everyone who made it to Hawaii for their nuptials on Monday. I had my third shower of the day and settled in to wait for Lisa. She was worth the wait. I was sure I took a picture of her. Ooops!
     The food was excellent. Three kinds of Poke,( marinated raw fish with spices,) pulled pork, beef, chicken and a ton of sides and salads. After the dinner was done the entertainment began. I will introduce you to Nin and Krista and show a few shots of the stage show that told the histories of the Polynesian peoples.

Krista and Nin, our hosts

It was a really good show, telling the history of the Islands from a Polynesian perspective. It could have used more fire. I like the fire bits. 
Thirty-five people made their way to Hawaii for the wedding. Krista`s family and friends came all the way from Toronto while Nin`s family and friends had a little easier journey from the West Coast. Half of them ended up flying into Maui after United cancelled their flight without notice. Well, we`re all here now and looking forward to the wedding on Monday. Lisa and I were invited to play golf tomorrow at the resort but we declined.
 I know, weird! We golf all the time. We don`t know when we will get to snorkel in Hawaii again.
     It`s one hundred miles to what is supposed to be the best snorkeling on the Island. We are getting up early to maximize our sunburns, Lisa has been crashed since we got home at ten. Between the sun and the snorkeling it really takes it out of you. I considered crashing myself, but I have become a blogging junkie! I can`t sleep until I get all this stuff out of my head. My head is now empty. I will leave you with a picture of Tess, this cute little three year old we shared a table with and some flowers from around the condo. Lisa told me what they were, but who listens to their wife?

You looking at me?

That's all I got.
Till next time
Peace Out Y'all

©2014 Dave Squatch Ward

Who's a Fat Bastard - At least I wasn't driving

June 27, 2014

     All I can say is " It seemed like a good idea at the time!" As many of you know we were going to go to the Volcano today. It's about one hundred miles from the condo we are staying in. Everyone, including Lisa, said you can't miss it. The pictures on the brochure show awe struck tourists walking among the pools of molten rock. To say the least, we were excited about the possibility of tossing virgins into the boiling lava. Well, I was anyway! 
     I was up early and doing the parts of my workout that don't need equipment. I started with the new and improved Tall Stool Stretch. It replaces the Four Stair stretch for the time being.

How graceful is this

Then with Lisa sitting on my feet, I did ten sit ups. You think that's not distracting! 

The picture of concentration

I finished off with ten sets of twelve crunches. Made it through a little easier than yesterday. I thought I might need to take a longer rest between sets, but managed with thirty seconds.

Like a turtle on it's back!

     After a quick shower I made myself breakfast. Eggs. tomato, avocado and sausage. Okay, I'm coming clean. They're hotdogs. I can't help it. I like them, I always have. These ones are turkey dogs. One gram of carbs each. Lisa won't eat them. Mystery meat, lips and lungs, too many nitrates, not really food. Blah, blah, blah. I've heard it all and strangely, I am unmoved. I still like them!
     In another episode of a segment I like to call "How much easier can it be?" I will show you how to eat an avocado. Avocados are loaded with heart healthy fats. You can eat them in a salad, on a burger or hotdog, turn them into guacamole or, just eat them with a spoon right out of the skin. 
Take a sharp knife and cut the skin down to the pit. 

Cut the avocado all the way around.

Next use the edge of the knife to remove the pit.

Eat the avocado with a spoon for breakfast.

See how easy that is. Did you know that there are dozens of different kinds of avocados? From the size of your thumb, to the size of a softball. All of them delicious!
     We packed a picnic lunch, ham, pickles, kielbasa sausage, Hawaiian apples, cheese and lettuce for wrap. Oh yeah, and cherries, that I'm not eating. I love cherries. Not as much as Lisa does. She'll eat them till she's sick. Right in front of me, God and everybody. Life can be so cruel!
    With two coolers full of food and water, we headed for Hawaii Volcanoes National Park. Normally when we travel, we meander aimlessly in the general direction of our ultimate destination. If we have an ultimate destination! However, we decided we would drive directly to the volcano. That way we could enjoy our virgin tossing without time constraints. Well, that was the plan anyway. 
     Unfortunately there were lots of things to take pictures of. Important things. Like these.

flowers

Green Bananas

Green fruit

     Not to mention the dozens of "scenic outlooks" that looked out on nothing. Honestly if you have seen one Lava field you have seen them all.

Miles and miles of scenic views?

It wasn't totally horrible. I ate the Hawaiian apple thing while we were travelling.

We stopped at a roadside place that had coffee samples, turkeys, sheep and macadamia nuts.

These turkeys are nuts!

     I wanted to buy a cup of coffee but the lady wouldn't sell me one. She gave me half a Dixie cup as a sample. "We don't sell cups of coffee" she said smugly "We are growers, not a restaurant." I could however buy a pound of their coffee for twenty-five dollars a lb. Lisa bought a pound of raw macadamia nuts and we drove away.

          It took us four hours to go 123 miles. On the highway! Once we were in the park, ten dollars for the car. We saw the steam vents and the big crater almost as soon as we entered the park. Not impressed. I have a kettle that makes more steam!

There was, in my opinion only three things of interest. The museum, the Lava tube and the end of the road.

Lots of cool facts about the hot lava that was no more

Lava tube...not for the claustrophobic!

End of the road

Sorry make that four, as in four o'clock. That's when we had lunch. The lava stopped flowing into the ocean in 2013 when the lava tube collapsed half way up the mountain.

Beautiful scenery...not!

And hard boiled eggs too!

Sparky the wonder car

     In short, I spent eight hours crammed into Sparky, like Pamela Anderson's boobs in a bra. Listening to Hawaiian music because "When will we ever get to listen to it again?" and " We can listen to rock anytime." I was trapped like a babe in a hole!

Babe in a hole

That's when we got the bird. This pheasant stalked me in the parking lot at the lava tube.

A less than pheasant day

     Of course the best part was as always the company.

Lisa and I and some steam!

     When it was all said and done, Hawaii's virgins are safe for a little while at least.

    It was after ten when we got back to the condo. The best thing I can say about the day was, at least I wasn't driving.

     I'm posting this Saturday morning because I fell asleep at the keyboard last night. 

     Today we Luau at the Orchid with the wedding party. Pig in the ground...yummy!

That's all I got.

till next time

Peace out Y'all