We started the day in our condo in Kapaa, Kauai. We got out the door right on time and to the airport to return our rental car. Our flight to Honolulu was on Hawaiian Airlines, and it was better than Go! Airlines in every way. Free checked bags for each of the four of us, an on-time take-off, and juice on the flight. We were very happy with Hawaiian, and we swore that we’d never fly Go! again.

We picked up our new rental car at Enterprise. It was a gold Ford Fusion, and all of the controls felt cheap and plasticy — remind me again not to buy a Ford. (I was impressed, however, with the Dodge Magnum that we drove all week on Kauai. Everything seemed to be in the right place and well-designed.)

We got out to the Pearl Harbor memorial and took the tour of the USS Arizona memorial. I liked seeing that, since it was something that I’d never really knew much about. By the time we finished with that, Debbie wasn’t feeling well and asked us to bring her back to the airport. She was so uncomfortable that she tried to get on an earlier flight back home, but she would have had to pay a lot, and wouldn’t have gotten home any sooner than our current flight. But she and Brad stayed at the airport for several hours while Sarah and I drove around the island.

We headed up the west-central highway and soon came to the Dole plantation. They had a huge gift shop with over-priced stuff (including a $16.00 bag of Chex mix!), but we enjoyed seeing the different species of pineapples that they had on display in their garden, and Sarah picked up some pineapple prep tips from the demonstration, so we thought it was worth stopping.

After that we rolled up the coast, past some super-crowded beaches where they’re now having a surfing competition (the waves were bigger than anything we saw on Kauai). We got to Laie, where the temple and BYU-Hawaii are located. We stopped for a few minutes at the temple, walked around and took some pictures and chatted with the missionaries there. We saw a few cool scenic views as we headed back to Honolulu to pick up Brad and Debbie and go out to dinner.

One of the things that we liked about Kauai was that everything had a small-town feel to it. There was good and bad in that, like when a big truck was trying to turn off of the only road, but overall it was good. Oahu had some of that as we got away from Honolulu, but driving on the freeway around here felt like any big city. I was glad that my first impression of Hawaii was Kauai instead of Oahu — I liked it a lot better.

When we were looking for a place to eat, we drove around the city aimlessly for a long time, getting hungrier and more frustrated by the minute. We just wanted a suburban strip mall with a few chain restaurants, but it took us forever to find it. We ended up eating at a dive that served us in styrofoam containers, but the food was actually pretty good and half the price of what we’d found at the Sizzler across the street.

Now we’re back where we were a week ago, waiting for a plane in the Honolulu airport. This time it will be our red-eye back to San Fransisco, and then on to the cold of Utah. My dad told me that they had a big storm today and that the roads were really nasty at home. We’re not looking forward to going back, because we’ve loved walking around in short sleeves and swim suits all week.

All week, Sarah was trying to come up with jobs that we could do on Kauai so that we could live there full-time. We thought of growing lettuce and tomatoes (after the sign at Bubba’s Burgers claimed that they had to ship those items from the mainland, so they were too expensive to put on a normal burger), starting a Cafe Rio, providing WiFi service at a store and selling advertising to local businesses, doing web development for local businesses, and going back into TV news and coming to work for one of the stations here (which would mean living on Oahu instead of Kauai — not ideal). But we knew that we probably wouldn’t be able to make enough to support our family on the expensive islands, not to mention having to do the travel ordeal whenever we wanted to see our families.