Hawai’i Day Five: a Beach Morning, a Verizon Afternoon, a Seafood Evening

6:30am. The couch in this condo, while a remarkably picturesque wicker/bamboo affair, is also remarkably uncomfortable. After a couple evenings of watching “Lost” and having to stretch out our backs on the floor afterward, we moved the couch out of the way entirely, so we could see the TV from the much more comfortable vantage point of the bed. As a bonus element, this arrangement leaves a thick carpet wide open in the middle of the living room, where I did yoga in my middle-of-the-night sleepless spell, and Jon has being doing tai chi in the mornings. Now that’s an excellent arrangement.(We’ll put it all back before we leave.)

So, there’s this business of my phone. I’m (oddly!) not frantic for it, despite the many ways we rely on our phones… I’ve already twice, just in our after-dive afternoon, had to reverse course and provide Jon’s phone number when I started to give mine—once for our parking validation, and again when we left his dive computer for a battery change. I’ve already had to ask to borrow his camera for this picture of the orange setting moon:

I’ve already thought about every function for which I would usually use my phone, from logging our condo’s TV into our Prime Video account last night, to checking in for our flights and carrying a boarding pass, if I don’t replace this phone while we’re here. And I’m not sure if I will. Maybe some time without phone is extra vacation-y, especially if I can still take at least a few pictures with Jon’s phone… it’s the camera I’d miss most.

In truth, I wouldn’t have brought the phone if I’d realized we’d be going that deep on the reef—but I watched it the whole time, taking pictures like a son-of-a-gun, nothing showing that it was under distress… After we got topside I tapped it open with face recognition and swiped a couple screens just to make sure it was all functioning, and for a moment it was. And then it said “no,” flashed its Apple symbol at me, and shut off. Well crap. Did I use up the charge, or did I kill the phone entirely? All right, I said I’m not frantic, and that’s true. But clearly I’m preoccupied with it.

3pm. While my phone continued to do what it was doing in its bag of rice, we drove up to Hapuna Beach this morning—an activity for which I have no photos. Given what I’d just done with my phone, I wasn’t about to ask Jon to let me take HIS phone near the water. He has always refused to take it to the water anyway (even with a case, let alone “naked”)… and although the patient man hasn’t whispered a word of I-told-you-so since this happened… well, he did, in fact, tell me so, beforehand. Dammit, don’t you hate that? (I could argue that the phone has been fine at shallower depths, for many a swim and snorkel… but I don’t think I’ll be permitted to take it swimming without a case now. As a cost for zero I-told-you-sos, that’s cheap at the price, though. I’ll take it.)

So you’ll just have to take my word for it that Hapuna is a lovely white-sand beach, and my bare feet looked especially happy in it. (You didn’t knew feet had expressions, did you? Well they do!) We put our towels down at the shaded end of the beach, wave-watching and people-watching. After a while, a fellow came along in a utility cart to hammer in a “no swimming” sign right in front of us. Rip tide today, apparently. Well, we weren’t really there to swim—-it was looking like a sand-in-your-shorts kind of surf anyhow.

Instead we picked up and went down the road a bit to Puako, to see if it were fit for snorkeling. At first I said yes—and then remembered how the surf came UP while we were out at Manini Beach yesterday, and made for a tougher exit from the water than we’d anticipated… and my legs being already sore from yesterday’s endeavors, and the surf being up on either side of our proposed entry point, well, I wasn’t game to have the surf come up on us a second time in a row. If I’d known that Puako wouldn’t be a go, I wouldn’t have dragged us all the way up the coastline just for the beach—-Beach-sitting really isn’t Jon’s thing, and the poor man was entirely humoring me (as he so frequently does). Sometimes you just don’t know till you know.

When we got back to our condo, we ate the picnic sandwiches we’d intended for the beach, and tested my phone—which did prove itself pretty conclusively to have been killed. When we acknowledged the sad fact, we decided to go to the local Verizon store and see what they might be able to do for me, cringing because I still owed almost a grand on the phone I’d just killed without insurance… So here’s a shout-out to Timothy, the freakin’ ninja of a Verizon salesman, who got me OUT of the contract on the dead iPhone 16 Pro and into a 17 Pro, using some creative accounting and a Black Friday deal! Wow, did I pick the time and place for a lesson learned at far cheaper cost than it might have been!

5:30pm. As a bonus, our Verizon-ninja also gave us (at my request) his “local opinion” on best places to eat, and tonight we went for his seafood recommendation, Umeke’s fish market & restaurant. We sprung for the Makai (seaward) Platter: 3 kinds of poke (raw tuna with different fixings), garlic shrimp, 2 types of sashimi (more raw fish), ahi katsu (fried breaded tuna), tako poke (octopus), and calamari. Enough for tomorrow’s dinner as well—what a feast! Timothy did us well again!