"Daddy take boat!"

Since Noel has started commuting downtown he’s using more public transportation to avoid the highway traffic. There’s a new option for Leeward Oahu residents to get into downtown in the morning and then back home “pau hana” (end of day) – TheBoat. It’s a pilot program that started last summer and works alongside the established, island-wide bus system, aka “TheBus.”

They don’t have a parking lot at the harbor, so each morning he takes it we load up the kids and head out down toward the water. The first day we tried it, Noel wanted to catch the 5:30 AM ferry. So I roused Robbie around 4:45 AM. Not easy. But the following days and most days since have gotten much better. All I have to do is say, “Daddy’s taking the boat!” and he perks right up. Hence the title above, his version of my greeting. (Noel doesn’t take it every morning - he actually drives in early in the week and leaves his car parked in a lot near his office in the evenings, then drives home Fridays. At least that’s more or less his routine.) And we haven’t done the 5:30 much since Noel changed jobs. We get him on the 6:30 or 8 AM. Much better all around!

I’ve got to start carrying a “real” camera around in the car. Here are a couple more cell phone shots. Even I’m getting tired of them. One is the boat coming into the harbor in the evening, the other is the same evening, but shows the sunset the riders were privileged to just before entering the harbor. To get a sense of how “big” the sunset was, I’ve drawn an arrow to the outline of the boat Noel was on.

And in other “boat news” – it was reported early in the week that Oahu is officially taking bids from companies to have our trash shipped to a Mainland dump via a barge. Landfills here are already past capacity, and have been given an 11th hour extension while environmental assessments are done and shipping contracts are ironed out. Interestingly, both shipping companies named as top candidates will carry our garbage to the same dump in the state of Washington. Oh the irony…we get their beautiful, yummy apples – and here come the rotten cores, right back at ya! We got take out the other day and it made me sad to see that the fork was stamped, “Aloha.” I thought, “Great. They’ll be able to track the trash years from now because this plastic will never break down. Aloha Washington!”