The early bird catches the wave (or Wednesday at the water)

I don't sleep well. I'm not sure whether it's the >1 bottle of wine I consumed or all of yesterday's excitement.  Be that as it may,  I am making coffee at 4:30 am.  At 5:45 am I have the bicycle down in the smoking area ready for an excursion.

There is barely any traffic on the pitch-dark roads. But there is somewhere I want to be before the sun rises.

Oncoming car

The old Kona airport, just North of town, has long been converted to a public recreation area, and there is a beach!

under the volcano

The cruise-ship tourists are coming

When I return home to the hotel I am relieved to find that Grandma's bedroom door has moved (GREAT relief) and I head down to the water again (the water right behind the hotel).

And YES, this is still before local sunrise. In the pictures below the first rays at some point hit the most elevated wave crests ;-)

Carnage ;-)

Darth Vader Crabs can grab onto the rocks when a breaker crashes over them !  Scary buggers. Good thing they're afraid of me ;-)

I'm not sure what figure this is.  Surfing Hari Krishna?

You Go Girl !!!!!

At noon, Grandma and I take a stroll down to the water, but her hopes of seeing turtles are not fulfilled.  While I saw at least 3 different turtles per day in the days after our arrival, none dare to approach the rocks with the high waves (Imagine being a turtle being hurled onto rocks by high waves). Smart turtles ;-)

After a 1-hour long nap, I take the bicycle to Keauhoe Shopping Centre.  They restocked the yummy clearance Chardonnay and I drag away 3 bottles for $12.something.  In Canada you'll be lucky to get 1 bottle of very ugly wine for that.



Then I get an e-mail from Vancouver with translation work that keeps me busy for a while.  But don't feel too bad for me. This is my 'office desk':

Not my pic; not my kind of restaurant.

Dinner at Kenichi Pacific restaurant in Keauhoe Mall is  disappointing. This is the highest rated Japanese Restaurant out of 7 in Kona. Too expensive for the food quality; food not quite good enough crappy for the price; either way you see it, I have no intention of returning. And this time that is not only the opinion of Grandma, who will indubitably declare the food an utter atrocity if served by a waitress instead of a waiter (Don't ask me, must be some Freudian thing).


While drinking (and eating), I come upon the following discovery.  While the ratio for drinkable bottles of wine bought in stores in Canada vs stores in the US is around 14/5, the prices for decent, glasses of wine in restaurants is about 1/1.  That wine in US restaurants should be cheaper if one can get a drinkable bottle for a cheaper price, me thinks.

Them's not paddling !