October 2008

Just a few random thoughts and observations from our recent trip to Hawaii.

1. Number of front yard Obama signs: > 100; number of front yard McCain signs: 0.   I expected a disparity, but 0 for McCain?  Either the area is more ‘blue’ than I realized, or the McCain supporters are afraid to show their colors.  And we did not see a single McCain bumper sticker, either.
2. The most contested political race on the island appeared to be for Mayor (of the county/island).  Thousands of front yard signs, more thousands of bumper stickers, folks waving signs alongside the road, etc.   K. Angel Pilago seems to be the favorite of the west and south parts of the island, Billy Kenoi the favorite on the east side, and a fair split on the north end.  Not sure what most of the issues are, but yesterday I found out that Pilago is for restricting the use of the word ‘Kona’ in coffee blends and against introduction of GMO (genetically modified organism) coffee plants, while Kenoi has not stated a position.   Is coffee a political hot topic on the island?  Let me get a cup and muse on that.
3. One initiative on the ballot in Hawaii is ‘Con Con’, a call for a constitution convention.  Not sure if they need one, but it has been clear for a long time that California needs one.  A few years back both Newt Gingrich and Fareed Zakaria (hardly ideological soulmates) were pointing out that the over-use of ballot initiatives in California had tied the arms of our representatives to an extent that they have little real power. The power now resides for the most part in who has the deepest pockets to mislead the populace into giving them what they want through the initiative process. It is past time to throw the baby out with the bath water, clean things up, get rid of a lot of the restrictions that the ballot initiative process has woven around the state’s constitution, and get a new constitution without all the baggage.
4. What is the deal with all the children, most school age, heading from SF to Hawaii in mid-October?   Our flight was dominated by families, and most of the children were ill-behaved and poorly supervised.  The children in the row behind us were either kicking our seats or screaming, and the ones in front of us reclined the seats, fully, as soon as the wheels left the ground then kept jumping around on the seats.  It used to be that by travelling in October we could avoid the family vacation crowd, but not this time.  Weren’t those children supposed to be doing some reading and ‘rithmetic?
5. Given the limited amount of coffee that can be grown in the Kona ‘coffee belt’, it should be criminal to blend it with beans from other places or to do anything but dark or expresso roast.  By the way, best coffee on the island:  100% Kona dark roast (IronMan roast) at Island Lava Java.  Greenwell Farms dark roast was a close second.
6. Every dive and snorkel shop, every guide book, and signs at most popular beaches all shout ‘do not touch or stand on the coral’.  So why does almost every person who puts on a mask and snorkel feels that it is fine to stop and stand on the coral whenever the water is shallow enough over the reef?  If I got a buck for every person I saw standing on the coral last week I could have paid for a good part of the trip.  Shameful.
7. While in Hawaii the news came out that the city with the worst traffic congestion in the US was …. Honolulu!   Los Angeles dropped to second place.    Who knew?  Of course, I hated Honolulu when I first went there almost 4 decades ago, and have avoided it since.
8. Related to the traffic congestion in Honolulu. one of the ballot iniatives on Oahu  is to fund a commuter rail for the area.  Shades of ‘BART to SJ’ in the messaging we saw in the ads.
9. It was strange to hear the use of the ‘D’ word (drought) being thrown about as if there was a big problem.  Hilo had 85″ of precipitation through the end of September ‘08, 95% of normal.  We would be drowning with 85″ of precip!  The north and west sides have been lacking a bit, but still strange to be in such lush conditions and hear the cries of drought.
10. The cycling ’scene’ in the area was a bit mixed.  Lots of folks commuting on hybrids, MTB’s, and cruisers.   There were a couple of tour companies taking cyclists for short road jaunts near Volcano NP, mostly on cheap MTB’s.   The rest of the bikes we saw were mostly high end road/Tri/TT bikes.  Lots of Cervelo P3’s.    Oddly enough, most of the riders were cruising up and down Ali’i in the Kona area, a busy, narrow, crowded road with a 15MPH speed limit through the business district.  Very few cyclists on the highways around the island even though much of the way there are wide shoulders.   And the few cyclists we did see out (other than the tour company “flocks”) were singles or pairs; there does not seem to be much in the way of group rides in the area.  The bravest cyclist we saw was the guy riding Hwy 200 (aka, Saddle Road) eastbound from the Kohala area.  The road is very narrow, in bad condition for the first 15 or so miles in that direction, has weird off camber turns, and lots of problems until one nears the turn-off to go up Mauna Kea.  And that is exactly what that guy did, started climbing Mauna Kea!
11. I am still mulling over how I feel about the wines of Volcano Winery.   Only two wines, both whites, are ‘pure’ grape products.  The one red and one blush are grapes blended with the jaboticaba berries, another white is a grape/guava blend, and one is made from honey and water with no fruit juice.  I would like to sample them a bit more, but they have no continental US distribution and shipping rates are outrageous.

Sunset from the lanai

It was a tough challenge, but we took it on. On Oct. 8th the orthopedic surgeon cleared me for “swimming, walking, and cycling”; the latter two are easy enough around here, but there is no pool in the area with open swimming, and the closest pool, which is not that close, has a very narrow lunch-time window for lap swimming. And the open water swimming season in northern California is long gone. So The Wife and I packed a small bag each and retreated to the island of Hawaii for 9 days of taking it relatively easy. Hard duty to ‘camp’ in a beachside condo, get fresh from the plantation coffee, and swim in open water that is above 70 degrees F in temperature. But we were up to the task! In fact, from the time the plane landed at the Kona airport until we took off I doubt we saw any temperature, air or water, below 70 degrees F.

One or the other of us will be blogging more extensively about our retreat, but in general we taxed the walking and swimming limits of my hip. All of the swimming was off leeward side beaches, and over 90% of it was with mask and snorkels so we could commune with the reef denizens. Only once did we leave a beach without entering the water; that was just north of the old Kona airport and after walking most of a mile out on rough lava and failing to find an entry point we were comfortable with in the surge-y condiditions. Not about to try to enter from a lava base if there is a good chance of being pushed right back into the rocks. But even then we just headed a few miles south and found a more protected beach with a sand entry. Tough life, I know.

Lava Java cinnamon roll (full sized dinner forks for scale

Lots of walking, too. Each morning we started with a 0.5 mile trek north for coffee and a cinnamon roll at Island Lava Java. Mmmmm, fresh dark-roasted 100% Kona coffee with a cinnamon roll bigger than my head. Ok, we weren’t fully decadent, we shared the cinnamon roll rather than having one each. Incentive for walking the mile round trip, for sure. We got a lot more walking, especially around Volcano NP. About the only part we missed there was the current lava flow, but to see that would have entailed a 60 mile round trip driving to the southern coast of the island then another 2-4 miles of walking across lava fields, the last half after dark as the fresh lava is apparently only visibly red at night.

With all the walking and swimming the leg was about ready to revolt by Friday morning; as I tried to get out of bed early on that morning the leg at first refused to hold the weight and started to buckle. But I caught myself and steadied before continuing. The leg was a bit tired and not up to a lot that day, but with rest Saturday afternoon and all the way home on Sunday it was up to a couple hours of cycling this morning. But darn it was tough going out into that cool morning air after that run of days with temps in the 70’s and 80’s.

Beth describes her version of the overpass challenge, an exercise for testing how fast you can spin your legs.  Her overpass challenge takes place on the downslope side of the overpass.  This weekend I got to face a different overpass challenge, one that takes place on the upward slope of the overpass; the basic challenge is, can I make it up this tiny ‘hill’?

One thing that became clear in the past two months on the trainer is that there was a great deal of muscular damage and atrophy in my right leg.  Stands to reason; the surgeon cut through a lot of muscle to get to the bone, then I had two months of laying around with that leg getting no activity at all.  The quad measurement on that leg went from 55cm to 49cm, a rough indication of the problem.   When I was cleared to go back on the road last week one of the lingering questions was how I would handle the fact that leg is still rather weak; I cannot stand and pedal as I cannot push past 12 o’clock with the right leg and there is not much power when I try pushing it while sitting.   The first two days on the road, in the neighborhood flatlands, the areas of difficulty were clear; mounting/dismounting, and stopping/starting.   I knew that adding climbing, even the short climbs up overpasses would be a challenge.  But it is almost impossible to go far from where we live without going over an overpass.

Saturday’s plan was for me to ride with The Wife to a coffee shop.  It gave her to the opportunity to see that I was not a danger to myself, and it would give me a chance to test my wings a bit more and get past areas that have heavy commute traffic on weekdays.  But the planned trip had two overpasses in close proximity and I was a bit concerned.  And I would be going over them twice, once on the way out and once on the way back. Would I get halfway up and need to put my foot down suddenly then walk to the top?  Should I gear down real low at the bottom and spin like mad to go over?   Could I do a mid-climb shift to a lower gear?  The latter was more difficult than you might think as I would be on my touring bike with downtube shifters.   In the end it turned out to be a non-issue.  I set a good rhythm going into each overpass and was able to get over them without much difficulty.  I did not try shifting on any of them, but felt that I had enough control that I could have if needed.  After the first two overpasses The Wife wondered why I was not following through with Beth’s version of the overpass challenge.  Yeah, right.  Like I could attempt to spin a high cadence at this point in my recovery.

I did all four overpass crossings on Saturday, then again on Sunday.   Next up will be a longer hill, but still with a gentle slope.

All of the press this weekend about one of the candidates having actually met and conversed with a 60’s radical has led me to confess my own radical past.  My association was not with the Weather Underground  but rather a more benign group, the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS).  I was never quite sure why a Democratic Society was considered radical.  But one of J. Edgar Hoover’s favorite hobbies, other than parading around in dresses, was making lists of radical organizations.  And SDS was near the top of the list of groups he considered radical and subversive.  Of course I never actually belonged to SDS, I was considered an ‘associate’.  And how did I become an associate?  Simple;  I bought cups of coffee!   Radical to the extreme!   See, at one point the student cafeteria raised the price of a cup of coffee from $0.10 to $0.15, a 50% increase.   In reaction to the exhorbitant price increase the SDS set up a coffee kiosk outside the student union and sold cups of coffee for $0.10.  And the FBI actually kept tabs on who purchased coffee at the kiosk and listed those of us who did as SDS ‘associates’.  Lest you think that is my paranoid streak talking, I know for a fact that I was listed as such.  At one point I needed a government security clearance and that factoid, my association with a radical organization,  came up as an issue during the screening process.

Spiro T. Agnew: A Great American

I’ve actually seen a lot of similarities between that ‘68-’74 period and the current political (and economic) environment.  In ‘72 we had a VP candidate who was about as eloquent in his speech as the current Republican VP candidate.   Spiro T. Agnew gave us such great phrases as “nattering nabobs of negativity” and “pseudo intellectuals” (pronounced “sway-dough intellectuals”).  The Alaskan guv is working towards those lofty heights; perhaps another sit-down interview or two and she can achieve parity with Spiro.   Of course ‘72 was the year the  Democratic presidential candidate had to reverse course and change his VP selection after the convention, a move that some have called for from the Republicans this year.    The only things missing are a break-in like the one at the Watergate complex and a campaign committee acronym like CREEP, though the way the Republican’s are going in their smear tactics this past week perhaps they can borrow that one.  Of course we can harken back to how the careers of the two folks on the Republican ticket in ‘72 ended.