Eastern Standard Time (EST) in Ohio is about six hours off – six hours ahead – of Hawaii Standard Time (HST).

So the first night that John and I spent in Kona, we woke up at about 2am HST. Woke up and stayed up.

We did pretty much the same thing when we went to Maui for our honeymoon, but on Maui the getting up so early had a purpose since we planned to drive up to the top of Haleakala to watch the sunrise. We had no such plans for the big island, so we hung around the condo for a while, had some coffee, read a little, and then finally got dressed and at about 3:30-4:00am we went out for a long, very late night, walk down Aili’i Drive along the seawall and through the empty streets of Kona.

We saw a lot of stray cats.

It was very quiet and peaceful, and I am glad that we got out and spent that time wandering around.

This is not easy.

One of the big drawbacks of living in what is so quaintly referred to as a “flyover state” is that it can be really difficult to get from here to anywhere else. We looked at multiple possible itineraries and airports (Dayton, Cincinnati, and Columbus) when trying to find flights, and everything kind of sucked. We ended up just using the Dayton airport on the rationale that since all of our options sucked, we might as well just use the closest and most convenient airport.

There were no direct flights. None. There weren’t even any flights with only one layover. We ended up flying from Dayton to Chicago, Chicago to Kahului (Maui), Kahului to Kona. (Our trip back took us from Kona to Honolulu, Honolulu to Denver, Denver to Dayton.)

Because none of our flights offered anything beyond the slightly frightening “boxed lunches for sale” option, we picnicked our way to Hawaii. I packed home-made sausage rolls, dark chocolate almonds, oranges, and a couple of bags of baby-bel mini-cheeses. We ate better then most of the rest of the people on our flights.

One of our flights (the Chicago to Kahului one) ended up being delayed for well over an hour (we sat on the plane, at the gate, for the entire time) because they had mistakenly boarded more people than they actually had available seats. Don’t ask me how that happened… shouldn’t they have been able to count and compare the numbers of passengers with the number of available seats and see that one number didn’t match the other? Argh. Anyway, it took them over an hour to kick someone off of the flight so that we could finally take off.

By the magic of a 6-hour time difference we landed in Kona around 4pm local time. We were not on local time. We were slightly beyond exhausted.

We found our luggage, picked up our rental car, and navigated through the strange and blasted lavascape that we had landed in to Kona, found our condo, checked in, and asked the manager to recommend a place for dinner.

Note: Driving through a blasted lavascape on paradise while listening to “Car Talk” on NPR in your rental car makes for a more than slightly surreal experience, especially if you are jet-lagged. Since we tend to listen to “Car Talk” on Saturday mornings while running errands, this only made everything seem even more off-kilter.

Anyway. The condo manager (shout-out here to Kona Reef condos, which was a perfectly lovely place to stay while in Kona) recommended that we walk down the coast a little and do Happy Hour at Don the Beachcomber’s.

I was feeling rather grim by this time and really needed a beer. Happy Hour sounded pretty good.

We walked right by Don the Beachcomber’s (because we didn’t realize that it was actually located at the Royal Kona Resort) and wound up at Huggo’ instead.

I highly recommend Huggo’s. This place was great. We walked in with no reservations at what must have been close to the dinner rush hour and, by way of simply asking for it, ended up at a table on the patio overlooking the ocean and the beautiful Hawaiian sunset.

We got those beers we wanted. I just wish that we could find Kona Brewing Company beer in Ohio, because they do very good beer.

The food was fabulous too. This was the fanciest place that we ate at on the whole trip. Looking back on it it is kind of a pity that we hit this place while we were so jet-lagged and tired. It would have been nice to have eaten here later in the trip (or to have come back a second time) so that we could properly appreciate the wonderful food.

For our third anniversary, John and I went back to Hawaii.  This time we went to the Big Island, since we were on Maui last time.

We started out on the desert side of the island, and then moved over to the rainforest side, with a stop along the way to check out the volcano.  I will talk more about the whole trip later… I am still processing everything.

Suffice to say that the trip was most awesome, and if we hadn’t started to miss the cats (and had a check out date for the cottage we were renting, along with return plane tickets) we might have been tempted to look into staying.

Speaking of processing, I took 14.7G worth of photos on the trip, and I have finally finished processing and uploading them.  They are all here on my flickr site.

The trip was supposed to be the anniversary present, but after we got back John gave me a anniversary present anyway… a set of six Thousand-Eye pattern goblets from the early 1900s.

Thousand Eye Goblet, containing a gin and tonic