Yesterday was Wednesday; my conference started in the morning. The hotel where the conference is being held is about 2.5 miles south of my condo. I had thought about running there one or two days, but honestly I haven't run much in Hawaii, and not at all since my hike this past Sunday. (gosh, was it only Sunday?) In fact, today was the first day my calves had recovered sufficiently (they were pretty sore) to keep me from walking like a duck. So I drove to the hotel, the Westin.
When I drove up in my rattletrap Nissan (that is so old it has a cassette player and no cupholder), the nice hotel employees in their matching Hawaiian shirts kindly let me know that for non-hotel guests, the parking is back at the mall (about a block away). They validate for parking but I still have to pay 10 bucks. That's not bad, actually. So I smiled and thanked them and drove off to find a parking spot. The lot is under construction but I was there early (7) and found a nice shady spot with no trouble.
I checked in to the conference, and realized that I hadn't downloaded the materials for the lectures, and they weren't letting anyone have the inch-thick syllabi that were on the table for people who had registered but not yet shown. So, I took extensive notes on the facing pages of the shorter syllabus I had brought with me. (I'm glad I didn't haul that huge book all the way out here.) The attendees were given breakfast vouchers for the three days we will be there in the morning, even if we weren't staying at the hotel. Bonus.
The conference center is nice - about what one would expect in a hotel: long tables, large meeting room, good acoustics (at least, not a lot of outside noise, but that could be due to the room's location as well), and over-air-conditioned. The hotel is pretty swanky, at least the common areas are - a huge rock waterfall in the middle of the open-air lobby, complete with live flamingoes stalking through. The breakfast was about what one would expect, too - buffet, with all kinds of food, including cold cuts and salad and fish, in addition to the regular eggs and bacon and waffles and fruit and made-to-order omelets. Guava juice in addition to OJ; fresh pineapple (of course). I shared a table with an OB/GYN named Lisa, from Oregon.
There were 5 hours of lecture from 8 - 1, and I liked all of them but I was disappointed in the one on sports injuries, because the level of detail seemed higher than one would expect from a garden-variety primary care doc or nurse practitioner/PA who doesn't do sports medicine on a daily basis. I am supposed to be signed up for his lecture tomorrow afternoon; I think I'll change to the guy who lectures on adolescent problems. He was pretty interesting. I liked the lecture on palliative care the best; I learned a lot from that.
After the conference I walked back to my car past a nice mall but didn't go to any stores. I had in mind that I wanted to drive up around the northwest coast of Maui and do some exploring. I lazed around in my condo for a while first, and by the time I left, it was nearly 3 o'clock. The light disappears rapidly around 6, and I didn't want to get caught out in a strange place in the dark. The darkness here seems really dark, for some reason. That may sound simplistic, but you either understand what I mean, or you don't.
I called my family to say goodnight because it was about bedtime for the kids, and then I took off. I drove about 8 miles clockwise around the island, and about 5 of those miles reminded me of the road to Hana, without the waterfalls. Complete rollercoaster - narrow hairpin turns, plummeting and then climbing again, all on this rocky cliff of a coast. I wanted to get to a place in the guidebook called the Olivine Pools. I followed the directions and I think I found them, but I was too chicken to clamber all the way down to the water by myself. The hike there was pretty steep and rugged, although everything will now be measured by the Na Pali yardstick, and by those standards it was average.
I saw so many little turnouts on the ocean side of the road (of course) and I only stopped at one on the way out. I took a few photos of the coast behind me. I realized as I got back in the car that there was a boar skin spread out on a boulder, head still attached. It gave me sort of a Lord of the Flies kind of surreal feeling. Anyway, I didn't stop at any of the other turnouts because I was afraid of losing my light, and I didn't want to be on those steep roads at night. I got home to the condo around 5:30, and went in search of food. I scored some discounted fried chicken at the ABC store for $1.62, and supplemented it with some things I had in the kitchen, so all in all I was satisfied.
Time to get writing about today, which I'll publish separately.
thanks for listening
wb
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