Miss me yet?

I think this is the longest time between posts since I started the blog. Sorry. The last couple of weeks have been a whirlwind of activity – just not the type of activity that makes for interesting blogging. Here’s the summary. Got up in morning and brought niece to school bus, went for lunch with friend(s), went to friend’s place for supper, out for evening, got home sometime after midnight – no point adjusting to Manitoba time since I’ll be back on Sydney time soon. I really enjoyed my time in Canada and for that I can thank the people there. Good as some of my activities were, what really made it good was seeing all of you. I didn’t get a chance to see quite everyone I wanted to see but hopefully you can understand. Now for the part you’ve all been waiting for…

“The sun is shining, I'm on the beach, its 33 degrees Celsius and I just got off the surf board after riding a 20 foot wave in.” I wrote this a few months ago in an email to someone who had expressed some jealousy over me going to Australia. I followed that by a sentence clearly stating that it was not true. This time, it’s much closer to the truth. I’m in my hotel room; the temperature was around 30, and I did ride a wave in on a surf board. I tried catching a bus to a certain bay to do some snorkelling but the bus didn’t show up so I had to find other things to do. Surfing was one of them. There are a few companies on the beach renting out boards and providing lessons. One of them had promised me the other day that if I took a lesson, they would get me wet and tired. Very true!!! And I even made it up on the board a couple of times to ride the waves. The tiring part is swimming out to sea against the waves.

I’m now in Hawaii and making the best of my layover on the way to Sydney. Clouds rolled in around noon my first day here so I decided it was not the best day for the beach. A little colour would be a good thing on my skin before I get back to the powerful UV rays of the Australian sun so there’s actually a good reason for spending some time on the beach. Oh well, I just went off to the next place and enjoyed the day at the Polynesian Cultural Center. Within the park are a number of different centers for different Polynesian countries. Each of them has some type of show or interactive display – very interesting. I only ended up on stage once as a “volunteer” after being singled out together with a bunch of other men and asked to come up. Until now, there have been stories of me dancing but no evidence – strange what you do when you don’t know anyone around.

Today I went out to Pearl Harbour and then got back to my hotel early enough that I thought I’d be able to go scuba diving. I checked into it a bit yesterday and thought the shuttle left at 2:30 so I should have an hour to spare. Well, when I called to book, I found out they actually left at 11:15. And what’s more, I can’t go tomorrow because I’m flying out Saturday morning and I can’t fly within 18 hours of diving!!! So instead of going scuba diving, I’ve rented a moped and plan to see if I can find my way around the island. Could get interesting since I don’t have a good map and my vehicle has a top speed of 40mph; but I’ve been told it’s easy (whatever that means coming from people who have done it a hundred times) so I guess I’ll soon find out.

One more day and then I get in the plane for a bunch of hours and head back to Sydney. If any of you are still jealous of me having this layover here, take a little bit of comfort in the fact that I have to leave my hotel at 5:15AM. It’s getting late and I need to get some sleep before my ride tomorrow but now you have something new to read. Hope you enjoyed. I plan to get some pictures up once I'm back in Australia.