Once again, I found myself required to make the five-hour flight to Hawaii for business. We’ve been having more face-to-face meetings than usual with the Keck half of our team (building an archive for one of the Keck instruments), because two months from now we’re undergoing an “Operational Readiness Review” which should be buckets of fun. About two-thirds of the time, the Keck folks come to LA – but we get our fair share of trips to Hawaii as well. Sometimes, we’re even forced to stay at fancy, expensive hotels. And it’s completely unavoidable that our meetings tend to fall just before or after a weekend, making it nearly impossible for me to not tack on a little vacation.

While our 2-day meeting up in Waimea has been, well, work (go figure), the days as a whole have been pleasant and almost as relaxing as full time vacation. It probably helps that I actually enjoy spending time after hours with my fellow travelers: Bruce (my boss) and David (project scientist, who does a really good drunken rendition of my Hamper Story).

The three of us all arrived early in the afternoon on Wednesday, several hours before we could check in to the Hilton Waikoloa (the aforementioned “fancy, expensive hotel”). The trip was a breeze, no doubt due to the fact that I somehow scored a first class ticket. (Beside the fantastic amount of elbow room, I think my favorite part was being served a warm chocolate chip cookie with milk, on a fancy little tablecloth carefully placed over my tray table.) We picked up one of our rental cars and headed to Kona for pizza and beers at the Kona Brew Pub, where I drove David completely bonkers by pointing out every cat, lizard, and mongoose that I spotted in the brush next to our outdoor table. (Yes, I said mongoose. This island is so cool.)

After killing a sufficient number of hours, the boys dropped me at the airport to get the second car, and we met up again at the Hilton. The drive from the airport to the Hilton is absolutely gorgeous – wide open spaces covered with black lava rocks or waving silvery grass, intensely blue skies, and an unending variety of cloud shapes entertained me on the drive up the coast. By the time we checked in, I was totally in the island mood.

My first few visits to the Hilton had left me rather unimpressed. It wasn’t because of any lack on the Hilton’s part – they have boats, trams, spas, lagoons, pools, waterslides, turtles, rocky beaches, funky statues, exotic birds, and for crying out loud, a dolphin-populated pond. It was the sheer sense of overkill that did me in, and the hyper-resort atmosphere created by the crowds of sunburned teenagers and japanese tourists.

But this time, the place has finally won me over. I think it started when I discovered the balcony of my room here in the Lagoon Tower overlooks DolphinQuest, where for $175 per person you can spend 20 minutes being introduced to dolphins. (You also have to make reservations several months in advance.) I can never decide if I feel sorry for the dolphins or if they’ve got a good deal going, but it was definitely fun to be able to watch them cavorting just outside my window.

Our first order of business after settling in was hitting the pool. The Hilton scored some more points with me when David and I discovered the waterslide. I can get some serious momentum going on these things – with occasional unfortunate consequences where my bathing suit is concerned, upon landing in the water. Ahem. Luckily, any sudden adjustments I had to make were hidden from public view by the enormous amount of splashing and foam generated by my landing.

Despite the fact that we were all subjected to the sight of each other in bathing suits/trunks, it was a darned nice way to spend a few hours. By the time we finally pulled ourselves away from the pool, it was basically time for dinner and a collapse into our beds.

I’ve been so good with my workout schedule lately that I was determined not to screw it up on this trip. Since the gym here at the Hilton has funny hours and costs $20 a pop, and the pools aren’t really designed with laps in mind, I only had one viable option: jogging. (Insert snort of laughter here.) And it gets worse: I was scheduled to meet my colleagues at 7am to head up the mountain for our meeting, so this jogging thing would have to happen really, really early.

So please forgive me if I take this chance to gloat: two mornings in a row, I got my ass out of bed at 5:20am and WENT FOR A JOG. (Where is Anna and what have I done with her, you ask?!)

First I tried jogging around the Hilton, but the paths around this place are a total mystery to me, and I wasn’t a big fan of tripping and sliding on wet flagstone, either, so I finally left the complex and headed along a bike/jogging path that leads back up towards the main highway. And I have to say, after years of making fun of people who go jogging at 5:30 in the morning while apparently on vacation, I think I finally understand the appeal. It was a stunningly beautiful time of day to be out and about, and the agonizing pain, labored breathing, and gallons of sweat actually seemed like a fair price to pay for the experience. I think if I lived here, I’d do this every day. All kinds of funny little birds were scurrying around, and the few people I bumped into were friendly and smiling through their sweat. The air was cool and breezy this near the water, and the sun just barely starting to peek over the mountains to the east.

This morning (the second day in a row that I woke up at 5:20 and WENT FOR A JOG), I had an additional half hour before I had to meet Bruce and David, so I decided to top off my jog with a stroll over to the dolphin lagoon. It seems like 6:30 or so is when the dolphins are most awake; they were goofing off and chattering at each other, and one was rolling around in the sand in the shallows. You can’t get too close without paying up the nose, er, that is “reserving your Dolphin Encounter,” but it was still an awfully nice view to enjoy while stretching the cramps out of my legs.

This evening was even better, if you can believe it. Bruce drove David to the airport to catch a red-eye, leaving me on my own after 6pm. I’ve been kicking myself the last few days for not packing a camera, but this evening I grabbed the video camera (which can take stills) and went for a stroll all the way to the far end of the Hilton in search of a good spot to wach the sunset. I finally found the perfect location back near my end of the place: there’s a stairway down to the rocky beach, and you can walk out onto the lava rocks and watch the surf roll in. There was also plenty of tidepool action to amuse me while I waited for the sun to get lower in the sky. Hermit crabs of all sizes were crawling all over the place and chasing each other, and I even spotted a funny little goby (my favorite kind of fish) darting around between rocks.

Pics (or some sort of screen grab) to come – I just discovered I didn’t pack the FireWire cable for my video camera, so it’ll have to wait til I’m back in SoCal.

I finished my evening off with more strolling around the Hilton, some chocolate cake, and a boat ride back to my building. The sky is totally clear tonight, and in the pockets of darkness between buildings and lit pathways, the view from the back of the boat is phenomenal: we have Total Milky Way Visibility here.

And so ends the business part of my trip. (My job doesn’t suck, huh?) Tomorrow I kick off the “real” vacation; two days of diving down in Kona. In other words, it’s JUST GOING TO GET BETTER. Somebody pinch me.