We recently went to Maui for vacation, as a whole-family situation — me and Ruth, Mom and Dad, Chris and Heather, and Kate and Christoff AND their two little ones. Kind of epic logistics-wise, tbh.
I'd never been to Hawaii! I had a great time. The sun and the sea were incredible, but we also managed to get out and around to what felt like a pretty wide variety of places. Maui has a whole lot of microclimates and biomes (cloud forest, omg), and it also has a whole lot more Nowhere in it than I expected from a small island. Chris and Heather used to live there about ten years back, so they took us around to see some sights they had fond memories of, which tended to be a bit off the beaten track. Their whole West Maui drive was pretty awesome.
The biggest thing in my memory was the snorkeling.
I've never done it before, and was kind of intimidated at first because I'm generally not at home in the water. (I've gotten way better! I think I posted here before about Ruth giving me swimming lessons, and it's helped a lot!) But this was an entirely new way of being in the water! It was nothing like swimming! Easy breathing and protected eyes was a big part of it, and the extra maneuverability of the fins really completed the effect: I felt comfortable, safe, unhurried, in control, and interested in everything going on around me. Just... following a weird fish around to see what its workday is like, or having a whole school of fish appear underneath me all of a sudden, or looking for patterns in the different kinds of coral, or HOLY HECK THAT'S A GIANT SEA TURTLE. (I think I saw at least eight sea turtles over the course of the week.) Also, the ocean was super warm; some of the others talked about getting cold after a while, but I never once felt cold in there.
After we figured out what was up (especially about wind/surf conditions being better in the morning), Ruth and I started every remaining day with a 45-minute-ish snorkel at some rocks right near our hotel, and what a way to set the tone for the day. Also, that generally meant I was looking at cool fish at the moment my ADHD meds kicked in, which was lovely.
UNFORTUNATELY, I somehow got locked into a dumb brain glitch where I keep saying "scuba" every time I try to say "snorkel." So if we hang out IRL and I say something about how great scuba diving was, IGNORE ME, I've never done scuba, I'm just trying and failing to talk about snorkeling. 😫
The reason I was in Hawaii with my family (beyond the fact that Hawaii is just pretty nice) is maybe a little complicated. I guess the short version is that it's the anniversary of "next year in Vegas," which was kind of a celebration of Mom not being dead.
So, Mom and Dad joined this weird timeshare thing several years ago. (It seems somewhat pushy and scammy to me, and mostly isn't the type of vacation I prefer to go on? But it actually seems pretty good for them, because it's nudged them to go on a bunch of trips they otherwise might not have motivated for, so hey.) They pay dues and accumulate "points," and then they spend points on hotel rooms. OK. But I guess the points can "expire," which strikes me as obnoxious.
Well, when Mom got diagnosed with stage 4 colon cancer in fall 2016, they had a bunch of points that were set to expire during treatment (which involved a lot of chemotherapy and eventually two different major surgeries). Not really a good time for a vacation. Anyway, she called the timeshare people and a sympathetic phone support person suggested a dodge: spend all the points on the most expensive thing she could find, with a reservation scheduled a year out, and then later cancel it and book something else, which would recover most of the points (minus a re-booking fee).
The thing that soaked up the most points was a resort in Las Vegas. When Mom told us about all that, she said "We might end up re-booking it, but I don't know, maybe if all goes well it'd be nice to get everyone together next year in Vegas." Now, Vegas weirds me out, personally, but in the middle of all these medical logistics and notes on doctor meetings and treatment plans and dire statistics about five-year survival rates... fuck me, "next year in Vegas" sounded like the sweetest thing on earth.
So we met up last year in Vegas. Mom loved having everyone around, so she went about organizing another resort get-together for the next year out, which is the Hawaii thing we just came back from.
BTW, Mom's doing OK these days. (And as for those heinous five-year survival stats... well, you don't know your score until the game's over, do you. But right now, Mom's doing OK. There's this line from Maggie Helwig's Girls Fall Down that I keep coming back to: something like, "We are not at home in the measured world." Trying to squeeze a definitive meaning from a statement like "no evidence of disease" just isn't good for the human mind, and it can make you feel quite ill after a while, so you end up trying to only look at it out of the corner of your eye, so to speak.)
Anyway, memento mori, but we had a great time in Maui.