Watch Out South Pacific, Here We Come!

We departed National Airport very early Thursday morning. We had a short stop in Phoenix, but when we arrived in Maui in the early afternoon, we'd been airborne more than 10 hours and had been on the road for 15.

We were a little punchy by the time we were in the rental car and headed to our resort at Ka'anapali on the West Coast.
Nana's global appeal had actually landed us an upgrade to a convertible. All she did was tell Michael, our National rental car customer service specialist, her name and suddenly it was:

Do you need help with that, Elizabeth?
Are you comfortable, Elizabeth?
How about a convertible? It's the only way to see Maui.

And so it was.

Later, we popped in to KMart for some provisions recommended by the famous secret guidebook and located these special water shoe-sock thingees, called Tabis. We almost lost it trying to get Nana's sneaker off to try them on and then hunting for a place for her to sit to put the shoe back on. (Solution? A Coleman cooler!)

These shoes - at about $30 a pair - came so highly recommended that I really was going to buy them. Can you imagine?? We ultimately decided that if a waterfall we wanted to see couldn't be reached without these hideous things, we'd just skip it.

We hit the Hawai'i Liquor Superstore (natch!) and Borders, too. Everyone really is so friendly and by the time we got back in the car for the rest of the drive to the hotel, lots of people knew the story of Nana going to Maui.

One really nice guy helped me pick out a book of Hawai'i historical fiction. It looks like a Hawaiian bodice ripper, but he assured me it was of the highest literary merit.

Check it out for yourself, it's called Shark Dialogues. I haven't even read a page of it yet, but the cover art is provocative-ish. Apparently the same art was used for a Maui phone book last year, which is hard to imagine.