First Hawaiian Vacation

© 2005 copyright Raymond C. Evans

It was our first trip to Hawaii, it would be an adventure. It would have been an expensive trip for us but we belonged to a barter exchange then, so we managed to meet about half the expenses with trade dollars. The rest would be in cash. There would be four of us going on the trip, my wife Joy and our two young daughters, one thirteen and the other fourteen.

There’s always adventure when you barter, most times you don’t really know what you are going to get until you get there. Sometimes things turn out way better than you might expect and sometimes worse. Over all, I think we have come out pretty well. Sometimes we ended up in pretty posh circumstances while trading and sometimes just the opposite. Still, there was always the adventure to be enjoyed no matter how things might turn out.

It all started about a month before Christmas. We had decided we would see if we could trade for a trip to Mexico. “Too late”, the broker said, “he didn’t have any opportunities left in Mexico”. “We still have some travel possibilities left in Hawaii”, he went on, “would you consider that”?

Well, I didn’t really want to go to Hawaii but after talking it over with Joy I thought going there should be better than nothing, maybe we should give it a try. After a few phone calls, Joy got everything arranged.

Our tickets and tour were arranged through a rather obscure agency, something we had learned to expect while trading. It was called “Sunshine Tours” or something like that; we were supposed to meet their agent at the Portland, OR airport. They didn’t have a regular counter there so we were to meet the agent at some particular airline counter. There we would receive our airline tickets, vouchers for the Condo, rental car, etc.

It was in the waiting area at the airport that we began to see this was going to be a trip to remember. We had arrived about an hour and a half early at the intended counter, not a soul was to be seen there for the airline advertised or our tour agent either. We began to wonder!

What do you do when you have a long wait at the airport? You buy a newspaper just like everybody else to while away the time. Page one, news and politics, page two, news and politics, page three, a certain airline was going to be refused admittance back to the Portland Airport starting tomorrow. This was because this particular turbo jet did not have the exhaust silencing package installed as required -------. Hey, that’s us, now we really began to wonder! This was a scheduled charter plane, a jet but a very old one. “Well if they get us over there, they’ll have to figure out a way to get us back”, we thought, hopefully.

We didn’t have to wait too long now for the tour agent to show up. There were two actually, both women. They had some kind of brief case with them from which they carried their paperwork. Among their papers they extracted a coat hangar and hung their company logo over the counter. Now we could see at last that they were proudly open for business. Now we really began too wonder!

These women were quite professional, it only took a few minutes to process the papers, and we would receive all the necessary documents in good order. All that was left to do was to follow their directions to where our plane was waiting somewhere in the bowels of the airport. Nothing to it! Piece of cake, nothing to it! Still we wondered!

It was a night flight, something close to six hours, no movies on this charter plane. The plane was old but it got us there according to the schedule. I had a hard time sleeping because of a leak in a very cold air duct, but I eventually figured out a way to fix it, just stuffed a pillow into the leak for an easy repair.

We asked everybody that seemed like they should know whether we were going to have a return trip or not. No one seemed to know the answer, if they did, they were not telling. We wondered some more!

We had a great trip, I fell in love with Hawaii, and this was the first time in my life that I had two whole weeks set aside just to have fun. Our older daughter won a drawing on the plane for a tee shirt at Waimea Falls. We would have to go to the falls to receive it. That’s a pretty good way to get us out there to spend another sixty dollars to claim a five dollar tee shirt but it was fun and we were glad we went.

I had great fun snorkeling the reef, and even more fun watching those Hula Dancers. Wow, how they can shake those grass skirts, grass flying all over the place, made me think I should have brought a goat with me, or a weed-whacker!

We came back on the same plane, couldn’t land at Portland though, had to land at Seattle and fly over our house in a different plane back to Portland where our car was waiting.

Yes, it was our first trip to Hawaii, but not our last, it was full of adventure that helped season the stew of our lives. It was fun; it was a true vacation full of excitement and new experiences. It was a wonderful trip. It made me want to go back again, and we have done so many times.