Salt-water therapy

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.