Maui in December: Sounds awesome, right? But if it’s your friend / co-worker / neighbour / frienemy who’s taking the holiday, and boasting nonstop about it on social media while you shiver here in Vancouver, it can be more than a little annoying.
Well, here’s the flipside, for those of you with a taste for some sweet schadenfreude. Imagine, if you will, saving up for a Maui vacation for two years, booking the trip back in January, and making it extra special by taking three generations of family.
Now imagine being woken up by your jetlagged kids at 5:20am Hawaii time, then pulling back the curtains on the lanai to groggily stare out at palm trees bending in hurricane-force winds against a charcoal sky as sheets of rain pelt the windows. Then pretend you’re Bill Murray in Groundhog Day when it happens the next morning, and the morning after that, and the morning after that.
If you can conjure such a thing, you’ll have a pretty good feel for our recent family vacation. Go ahead and revel in our bank-breaking sogginess, but you have to admit: There’s something downright cruel about Vancouverites spending thousands of dollars to fly 4,356 kilometres to escape the rain, only to arrive to much more of it.
Hey, we made the best of it. What choice did we have? Stay in the hotel room all day? I did that on a vacation in the Dominican Republic when, again, it rained the whole time. I ended up watching a five-day-marathon of Little House on the Prairie in Spanish.
The hot tub at our hotel was still fun in the rain. We even met someone in the tub who voted for Trump. She was very anti-Obama, saying, “Who is Obama, anyway? I mean, where does he even come from?” My wife responded, “Um… Hawaii, actually,” which was followed by the Trump supporter’s stunned silence.
Just as the weather was finally starting to clear up, a middle-aged couple from Minnesota arrived in the suite above us. Oddly, they kept their curtains drawn tight all day, emerging only at night. They were loud talkers, but we didn’t think much of it – that is, until the man, who resembled cartoonist Robert Crumb, got absolutely and repeatedly wasted. Drunk as a skunk, he’d slur abusive remarks at his wife at the top of his lungs, then beg for sex and “a baby,” all the while flicking his Marlboro butts down onto our lanai (in a non-smoking resort). His lunatic ravings and smashing and banging went on all night long, which thoroughly freaked us out: I barricaded the doors and my 11-year-old nephew cried. It was like a cross between National Lampoon’s Vacation and Cape Fear. When the couple finally checked out a few days later (after repeated run-ins with security), we were shocked to learn they were on their honeymoon.
My sister finally had enough of it, treating her family to a one-night stay in a big, fancy resort a little further south, in what is typically the sunnier part of Maui. Except it poured there, too, and the hotel’s deluxe pool was closed due to a Code Brown (that’s resort-speak for a kid taking a dump in the pool.) But their room had a lovely view of a gigantic construction site.
We did eventually manage to capture the “Aloha spirit” of the islands, and it was the time spent with each other that mattered most: snorkeling with my 15-year-old nephew, a sunset dinner with Mom, watching the cousins play in the sand, and hearing my 11-month-old daughter say “Mama” for the first time. All that, and listening to my three-year-old yelling, “It’s raining AGAIN?”
