There’s still laundry to do.

I think it is easy to fantasize about the places we are traveling or about a life of travel to exotic places. But they are only exotic to some. To natives, they are merely home. It is easy when writing a travel blog to set up the perfect shot or feature only the highlights of a destination. Some people before we left said they envied us. Well, today we did laundry and bought toilet paper. I don’t mean to sound like “this sack of gold is sooo heavy,” but it is important not to get too involved with the fantasy of being someplace.

Kevin’s cousin Karl, a longtime resident, gave a wonderful tour. He welcomed us with leis in the traditional manner. He took us up to Tantalus Mountain to look out over the city and showed us a night on the town. And he explained a lot about the history and layout of the town of Honolulu.

We decided to get around town with a trolley company. The drivers were locals who kept patter going over the PA system about the island and their experiences on it. One trolley driver mentioned that the word aloha doesn’t mean hello and goodbye as everyone thinks. In fact, it means love. It is used in greeting and leave taking just because it is so much a part of their culture.

Mary and I noticed that without being able to put our finger on it. The people here are very generous and very kind. They have a lot of love for each other and their islands. They have a lot of love even for strangers. They want people to come and enjoy their islands and appreciate their islands. They don’t necessarily want people to overdevelop their islands and make the cost of living so high that the locals cannot afford to live here after doing so for many generations.

There was a protest the other day about a telescope being built on the highest mountain in Hawaii. This is the latest in a series of developments that the locals have finally had enough of. We toured an area with a lot of local businesses and street art.

The trolley driver said it would all be high-rise condos soon. They were moving them out.

An underground energy facility was recently built near a fragile ecosystem. Hawaii was formed by volcanoes and has a lot of underground lava tubes. These filter the water coming from the mountains to the sea. The locals argued that it could damage those lava tubes. To show that there was no reason to worry, the developers had a test run of the facility and (guess what?) ancient lava tubes were destroyed. So you can understand when the locals feel not a lot of aloha for leaders and moneyed interests.