From Hawaii to Cleveland

From Maui we flew to Oahu and had a couple of lovely days on Waikiki Beach in Honolulu. It was so fun thinking about the old days when we were there in our early marriage. One of the biggest arguments of our lives to that point came when Rick decided, because we were so poor that he was going to find a great cheap buffet, gorge himself in the late morning and then he’d be fine on food until morning. I was not fine with that and he soon learned that I eat only small amounts several times a day. It was a pretty dramatic argument but I won AND learned how to always carry food in my purse (sometimes from the buffet) to survive. Funny!

Nevertheless we were delighted to be back in our old stomping grounds! The banyan trees and sunsets abounded, as always:

Some of our time was spent with this wonderful dynamic woman (in yellow) and her parents whose grandfather happened to have immigrated from Pakistan when her dad was young. 

We had such a good talk and her delightful and very opinionated 80-year-old mother came to our presentation below: I can’t believe I didn’t get a picture of her father who was 88 and joined us for dinner straight from playing tennis!

My beautiful fragrant lei and Rick’s beauty made with nuts and fresh leaves were heavenly!

They had a graphic artist who did this fun thing with our book staring her darling little son Subash, who was an only child and the apple of everyone’s eye! They had our book inside the box which was the invitation to this event.

The morning after the event we met some of the parents for breakfast at a beautiful, modern hotel with lots of clever ideas…like an upside down Christmas tree:

And by evening it was time to fly off….to Cleveland! It was an overnight flight, then on to Minneapolis and then a change-over to Cleveland. We wondered if it was worth the trip until we met the extraordinary people who took care of us there, one of which was an owner of several car dealerships. He left us with a new Porsche Cayenne which is a crossover….complete with all the places we might want to see in the GPS. We drove ourselves to see the sights including the Rock and Roll Museum. We even drove ourselves to the event where we had such a good time with about 80 beautiful people like the ones below!

I have to say that this trip was a pure delight. We had spoken in Cleveland nine years earlier for the guy on the right and he decided it was time for us to come back. We’re so glad he did but we don’t mind saying that we’re going to be pretty happy to get home tomorrow night! We have only one more trip next week and then we’re home for Christmas.