Each day we are counting. When we get to fifty, we know we’ll be ready. Until then we continue to count days. This last Shabbos we counted people.We never forget to count our blessings. Most days we also hike, climb and of course, think...in a fashion. We did a lot of that yesterday as we crossed the swamps. One of our thoughts was of our editor. Why did she lead us in and through the mud, into the mist across the swamps to see admittedly, an attractive place? There are questions we dare not ask. Just another of the things we are learning in our quest to understand our wonderful wife and, women in general, before we leave this earth. If Hashem wants us to gain an understanding then it would seem that we have many more years of hiking left in us. Our problem, you see, is that we are a little on the slow side.
We digress for a change. Before we continue, for the record, we admit we enjoyed the eight-mile hike that took us to unusual places in weather that alternated between sunshine and complete cloud cover every few minutes. We are fortunate that we did slip and slide but without injuring ourselves. In that situation, we are always in a state of high alert or ‘orange going on red’ in government parlance. The going was slow in places and quite tough so we spent five hours on the trail and ended exhausted. It was the busiest trail we have encountered thus far, yet not close, in our opinion, to the best hikes in Kauai, and quite dangerous because of the conditions.
Sometimes we meet very interesting and charming people and other times, not. Yesterday, we spoke to a couple and within a minute, the woman impressed us immensely. She indicated that she had the fortune to complete the hike in sunshine, thus seeing a mountain nearly always covered in cloud. To us it was clear that she is a person whose attitude causes the ‘sun to shine’ when she is around. Another fellow, Brian explained his understanding of living on the Island. We find the food costs to be twice that of the mainland. As we don’t see many opportunities for labor, besides helicopter pilots, we wonder how people manage. Apparently, the natives acquired much land in the earlier days and live off the proceeds nowadays. Whether this is a full answer, we certainly don’t know but we still find it expensive.
As always, there are many Germans and other nationals on the trail. The Germans are a nation of walkers and hikers, no doubt. What we have also determined, an opinion of course, is that Kauai, and Maui to a slightly lesser degree, has a distinctive flavor. One does not feel that one is in America in this part of the world. In fact, it is a closer feeling to the Caribbean than the mainland. Whatever it is, these islands are very nice places to live.
With all the digressions and our editor being so weary and not keeping an eye on us, we have run out of time so we’ll talk about the great mystery of whales and government another time…
Cheers,
Jenni and Jeffrey
No comments:
Post a Comment