January 14, 2001

We arrived at Logan Airport at 7 AM which should have been plenty of time for us to catch our flight at 7:45. There wasn't even a line, but the ticket agent told us that she couldn't give us our tickets because there weren't enough miles in my Northwest Worldperks account. That seemed sort of strange since I had spent a couple of hours on the phone working out all the details with a Northwest Worldperks phone agent about adding on a flight from Honolulu to Kona at no extra cost other than a $35 charge from canceling the original ticket and redepositing the miles back into the account.

But who cares about all that. The long and the short of it is that we missed the plane by three minutes. A very nice lady took us in hand and very calmly set about rebooking our ticket through Minneapolis and Seattle. The connection in Seattle was tight, only twenty minutes, but what choice did we have. Our bags were sent on our original flight. As she handed us the tickets the Northwest agent told us that since it wasn't our fault that we had missed the plane she had upgraded us to First Class. Our karma was good and traveling first class was very nice.

Taking off in Minneapolis we were held up for 25 minutes so it looked like we would have to spend the night in Seattle. But the winds were favorable and we made up the time, catch the flight to Hawaii, and were able to pitch our tent on the beach in Hookena, Hawaii in the dark under stars.

January 31, 2001

We are in the middle of our third week in Hawaii. We're relaxed and into the rhythm of thing I was about to say but there is no single rhythm. There is the daily rhythm of sunrise and sunset: sunset being much more important to us especially due to Hookena, the beach where we are camped faces the setting sun while the volcano behind us shields us from the rising sun. The dolphins have their own rhythm and as far as I have heard no humans have figured out how to predict when the dolphins will come in the bay.

The last time they came was three mornings ago. Marianne and I each had a half used one use underwater camera. We had use the first halves when the dolphins had been around 4 days before. I was hard getting good pictures because the dolphins were a bit standoffish and didn't want to play with the leaves that I had brought out.

Then within seconds of taking our last photo one of the dolphins started playing the leaf game with me and another swimmer, catching it on a fin and swimming with it, sometimes dropping it off a pectoral fin and catching it on the tail fin.

Living outdoors, camping, and swimming all the time has changed us. Not just mentally, but physically: after a few weeks our bodies had begun to adapt to being in a tropical environment. Our skin was no longer the pasty white that is natural in New England this time of year but in Hawaii is like a flashing neon sign saying you have just arrived.. Sunscreen lotion is a great thing: we were able to avoid ever getting sunburned and slowly developed a nice light tan. We began to feel like healthy animals. Civilized life is full of comforts and conveniences , but aren't most of us living our lives in cages? We have the keys so we can go from our sleep cage and travel in our car cage to get to our work cage, but we are so well trained that we seldom even dream of escaping.

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