J and I got married in June 18 years ago. With it being shortly before the end of her teaching school that year, we had to wait for a bit to get to our honeymoon, which we had on Maui.
It’s a pretty spectacular island, and we made the most of our week-ish there by checking out as much as we could. We snorkelled at the beach and at a nearby reef, and went up a volcano to see the sunrise followed by biking back down said volcano, we did a bit of driving around to take in as much as we could, made quick and easy connections with the easy-going and engaging locals, absolutely loved Lahaina (our hearts broke at the news of the fire two years ago that demolished so much of the town and killed 102 residents), it’s where we discovered that Hawaii only ships abroad its second- and third-rate pineapples and they keep the best for themselves to indulge in (it’s like the best candy in the world), and is where I first got up and stayed up on a surfboard.
More than anything, though, I have one distinct memory that keeps popping back into my head every so often. We were driving on the highway on the northwest coast of the island. It was small, as everything is there, so it just was our lane, the oncoming lane, and then open, flawless beach that went out maybe 75 feet, and then ocean that looked like it went to the end of the world. Odd that among every countless and visually spectacular memory made there, that one in particular stands out.
It was perhaps my experience in leaving that paradise and coming back to the grind of work that helped tattoo that onto my brain forever. At the time I was working in an office that was about a half hour drive away. More in rush hour, of course. And more still when there’s an accident up ahead, as there must have been on this return drive home. I was in bumper-to-bumper traffic under/within concrete cloverleaf roadways twisting around me, and it was such a way that all I could see was lanes of cars jammed around me, concrete surfaces, and a fat wedge of sky above.
… and it occurred to me as I sat there unmoving in everyone’s exhaust, surrounded by metal and glass and concrete, that only a couple of days prior, I was driving on that highway, one lane from gorgeous, totally unpopulated beach, with ocean that stretched as far as the eye could see. And I wondered what the hell we were doing that we chose to leave Maui and come back to this lifestyle.
Long before we left, we knew that Maui was a place we would want to come back to again. Having said that, it was of course a particularly expensive trip (I mean, it’s an 11+ hour flight, and if one is going to splurge on bells and whistles, one does so on one’s honeymoon), but even for a pared down second trip, it’s one we haven’t been able to save up to enjoy again. It’ll have to be added to our bucket list for now. This time we would be bringing our teen, who’s not only a lifelong lover of beach and water and would be in heaven just for all of that alone, but is now old enough to perhaps appreciate seeing the place where J and I celebrated our love, and the place itself that we fell in love with.