Five Nights in a Turtle

By Rosemary L Rigsby

This travel/memoir describes a camping holiday on the Big Island of Hawaii, where a couple went looking for a little slice of paradise. What they discovered was anything but. The economic crisis of 2008 hit Hawaii especially hard. With tourism as its number one industry, Hawaiians suffered more than other states when tourists, mostly US resident

• Language: English
• Publisher: Rosemary L Rigsby
• Release date: Nov 4, 2018
• ISBN: 9780993936128

Rosemary L Rigsby

Rosemary Rigsby writes from beneath her own Urban Fir and more information can be found at https://rosemaryrigsby.wordpress.com

Book preview

Prologue

Are we crazy ? I sit in the dark on the narrow rear seat of a Volkswagen camper-van. Sweat beads on my temples and I lift strands of hair stuck to my neck. A gnat settles on my nose. I rub the little pest off my face. The screened windows keep my gnat’s relatives from joining the feast, but also bar any air currents that might cool my neck and other damp body parts .

Gentle snores resonate from Grant, who is my dear spouse in spite of his ability to sleep anywhere. He has found refuge in the cramped space behind the back seat.

This van will be our home for five magical days and nights–our dream vacation in Hawaii. I close my eyes and see black tattoos on a grinning face. The far-from-magical incident this afternoon made my innards quiver even though Grant appeared as composed as any illusionist pulling a rabbit from his hat.

We retreated to this campsite where our volcanoes-and-beaches adventure on the Big Island should begin. I squeeze my eyes shut and try to picture that we are camping on a star-lit beach, instead of in an unpaved parking lot next to a derelict SUV. Maybe camping, instead of staying in an airy bed-and-breakfast, won’t be the romantic escapade we expected.

I sigh and open my eyes. I will have the whole night to contemplate the sequence of events that brought us to this miserable state.

Maybe we are crazy.

1

Paradise Beckons

When I called my sister to surprise her with our news, I preened my ego in anticipation .

The big news? Grant and I had decided to go to Hawaii in the following February 2014–our first time there together.

That’s great, good for you guys! she said.

As predicted.

Ego smugly grinning, I went on to say, and we’ll camp on the beaches of the Big Island. In a Volkswagen camper-van.

Silence.

Hello?

Really? my sister said. Are you sure?

I heard her relaying the news to her husband, who mmmphhhed.

Her lack of enthusiasm removed the grin from ego’s virtual face, since she and her husband, like us, claimed expert camper status, even though we had long rejected tenting for the comforts of recreational vehicles. And, like me, my sister had once visited Hawaii and had fond memories of beaches, luaus, and friendly people. Ego pouted, but I did not ask why the plan unsettled her and elicited mmmphhh from my brother-in-law. Perhaps they envisioned lonely strands stalked by vagrants and criminals–a vision I did not share, or refused to see. Neither said much more on our camping scheme, but I could read the subtext–they thought we were bonkers.

Why camping, they asked?

Why indeed.

Sometimes the most exceptional event begins with the most mundane non-event. On February 25, 2012, as usual on a Saturday, Grant pulled the weekend edition of the Vancouver Sun from the mail box. By late afternoon he had reached the travel section. He usually did little more than glance at it before dropping it in the pile by his chair. On that afternoon, a picture caught his eye, and, as soon as he read the caption, he flapped the creased page down in front of me. Before our Saturday steak sizzled on the barbeque, we had both read and re-read the article that started it all.

With words and photos, the author painted a technicolour portrayal of her family’s magical Hawaiian camping trip in a rented Volkswagen van: barbeques on golden beaches, sunsets and solitude, and the freedom to move from beach to beach on the whim of the day. The author described feeling immersed in the landscape as something never attained in a hotel with four walls and air conditioning.

We’d always thought our Hawaiian getaway, if it ever happened, would at least involve a B&B, if not a hotel or resort. That article changed everything.

Grant had never shown me any typical vacations described in brochures or newspaper travel sections, and nothing I had read had appealed to me either. The thought of bus tours and air conditioned resorts with cable television and cocktails at six made me feel faint. Good God, I’d have to put on make-up every day.

Deep down, if I had looked, might I have seen the tip of an anxiety iceberg bobbing beneath the surface of my psyche? Did I shy away from conventional resort vacations, not just because of the expense, but because I lacked the self-possession to pull off the rich tourist persona? I had once had the opportunity to take a Caribbean cruise. When the plan fell through, I only felt relief that I need not shop for a formal dress, and that I need not worry about upsetting my wine in the captain’s lap. Despite my wardrobe and poise neuroses, something about upscale holidays failed to inspire.

It wasn’t that I wasn’t comfortable in a hotel. I had once travelled for work, and Grant’s job also required travel for presentations and conferences. We, singly and together, had had the pleasure of staying in many fine hotels. When available, I took advantage of a pool or exercise room, and we often ate in hotel dining rooms or sipped wine in sophisticated lounges. I had never dumped my wine in anybody’s lap. Yet, destinations where conventions demanded a certain decorum were not places where we could unwind, nor were they in the running when we planned a vacation.

We often escaped to luxurious B&Bs for weekend retreats, especially in the off-season, but when summer holidays rolled around, we vacationed in our travel trailer, or in rustic lakeside cabins. We loved stepping out of trailer or cabin onto real earth even if it was dusty or on top of an anthill. I loved the smell of sun-warmed greenery, the scent of water-weeds in shallow water, and the soft honks of mooching Canada geese. Grant loved paddling a lake trailing a fishing line. On hot afternoons, we often swam and then lazed in shaded chairs with books and beverages. We dozed with the sounds of happy kids (other peoples’) splashing and diving from a not-too-close wharf. We went home smelling of wood smoke and feeling that our hot dog quota for the year had been met. We longed for beaches and towering trees, not swimming pools and concrete towers.

A camper-van vacation in Hawaii fit our holiday style, but a streak of thrift perpetuated that streak of whimsy. The streak of thrift demanded economy, and the van fit our budget: rental and camping fees were less than a modest hotel room. But maybe something else about the van drew us. Maybe we were travel snobs of another ilk, but we’d never hit upon a tropical vacation that suited our taste for a close-to-the-land experience, our need for a close-to-the-ground budget, and our hankering for something different.

The camper-van delivered on all counts: whimsical, economical, and something nobody in our social circle had done. But the timing was not yet right.

I clipped the article out of the paper, and folded it away in my one-day-maybe file. Every so often over the next year, I pulled it out and re-read it. When we revisited our Hawaiian dream vacation, we envisioned our vintage van sheltered under palms, their lazy fronds swishing to and fro like a tropical metronome. We saw ourselves (me sans make-up and Grant with a manly stubble) beholding, with appropriate beverages, a Hawaiian sunset from low-slung chairs on a secluded beach.

We often accompanied such fantasizing with glasses of red wine in front of the fireplace while a west coast gale bucketed rain and howled through the firs in our back yard.

In mid-2013, the money tree, fertilized by an unexpected tax refund, bloomed. At last, the timing was perfect. We wrote our Hawaiian wish list. I lusted to see magma boiling in the depths of Kilauea Volcano, and Grant longed to cast a line into the deeps of Hawaiian waters. We both yearned for that camper-van. Also, despite flying to other places for work and pleasure, Grant had never touched down in Honolulu. He wanted to swim in Waikiki Bay.

Although it had born fruit, the money tree was more of a shrub, necessitating a pruned list of sights and activities. We snipped the fishing trip. However, because of Grant’s desire to see Waikiki, and because I hadn’t forgotten the highlights of my years-ago visit (when make-up wasn’t as essential), Waikiki stayed on