Whaddaya MEAN You've Never Heard of Me?!?

Flying into Maui was exactly the right length of flight, about half an hour. Sadly after that our next task was picking up the rental car, which took about a million years.

Way back, during undergrad, the Faculty of Science used to have four hour queues at the start of each semester, mostly to do with switching units of study before the fee deadline. (I think you needed to be enrolled in units by the second week, and have dropped out of them by the fourth.) I tended to notice that, by the head of the queue, people were adding to the time by being sure to ask the Faculty staff. every question they'd come up with in that four hours. If I do this subject now, and this other subject in second semester, will this preclude me from taking this unrelated subject in third year? Good, just checking.

Rental car companies, especially in the US, seem to work on the opposite of this principle. By the time you reach the head of the queue, you are dying to take the keys and just go, and they're dying to up-sell you. I don't remember all the pitches, but one was for key insurance; I believe it was about $35 a week and they won't charge you any extra fees if you lock the key in the car and they need to retrieve it. Otherwise, something something, thousands of dollars. You can either take the insurance (it's all helpfully in the first invoice they issue) and leave on-time, or get them to remove it all one-by-one.

I was there to be added as the second driver; once Andrew's father got the upgrade to the eight seat vehicle we wanted, we went outside to find it. It was a late model Yukon XL, I later started referring to it as 'Sherman' for its tank-like properties. I've never driven a vehicle that large, nor had I ever driven on the right before, but I figured the only way out was through, and I drove Sherman back around to Kahului airport to pick up Andrew, Ilga, Nina and V, and then to Kāʻanapali, about a one hour drive. Other than aggressive drivers in Kahului (one half second of hesitation and someone turned left across me) it worked fine. Making all the adjustments for driving on the right is fairly easy as long as there's other traffic (lack thereof bit me once, later, in California).

In Kāʻanapali we had apartments rather than hotel rooms, which worked well with a supermarket across the road, and stopped the whole first-world gatherer problem of needing to spend an hour researching restaurants for every meal. The complex was still a bit of a death-trap for V, with beach frontage, and an unfenced pool (shallow, but deeper than his depth, and he doesn't have enough sense anyway). Somehow the pool water managed to be very nice, rather than freezing as it was in Honolulu: perhaps they were heating it? At night, as a bonus, there were loads of lit tiki torches. V continued his running-away games for most of the holidays, but mercifully was never found in the pool or on the beach by himself. During the day he very much enjoyed the hot tubs with us, rather illicitly at his age.

Originally posted at http://puzzling.org/logs/diary/2013/May/23/hawaii-maui