So, Hawai'i...

Things I'd heard that were really true: Gas is expensive (over $4.60 a gallon), milk is expensive ($5 or $6 a gallon), everything else is expensive (everything), and the weather is reliably good (if you don't mind your warmth occasionally very windy).

Things I'd been given to believe that were not so true: Snorkeling is always great on Maui. Of course, my first and only experience of snorkeling was in the John Pennenkamp Coral Reef (underwater) State Park near Key West Florida, so that'd be hard to match with wade-in-off-the beach reefs, I suppose. And maybe we just picked the wrong time to go, but we got only one good morning in before the aggressive waves murked up the water so much we could barely see or stay off the rocks ourselves. Oh, well. It was water we could swim in; don't get that at home.

Also, I never knew I liked Hawaiian music until I went on the dinner cruise that I admit I thought was a cheesy idea. A young man started singing and didn't stop for most of the two or three hours that we mostly just rocked on the water and scanned for the occasional accommodating whale. It was the best part of an excursion that was in every way quite lovely. That language that can all be written in 12 letters (13 if you count the ', the glottal stop consonant that really should be in the word Hawai'i) is so musical. When I heard that the movie "The Descendants" was entirely scored with Hawaiian music, it was a new reason to see the movie, more even than GC himself.