ALOHA from Kauai!

A new day, a new island! I arrived on Kauai two nights ago, with Mikey, my lovely sister Amy, and our new friend Tim Fontana, who we met at the Rainbow Surf Hostel in Paia, Maui.

We spent about five weeks total on Maui, and we had an incredible time! I think we all could have stayed longer, except Maui can really put some stress on your bank account. We ended up paying for more accomadations on Maui, and food is extremely expensive as well. The other expense that was new for us on Maui was our rental cars.

The Rent - a - Wreck Parade!

The day before Amy arrived, Mikey and I rented our first car (first rental car ever, neither of us has ever rented a car before). We checked out the prices at the major companies and found them unacceptable. Eventually we found a little joint called Kimo's Rent a Car in Kahului. Kimo's is really a garage that keeps cars that have been destroyed and rebuilt, and rents the junkers out to tourists for cheaper than commercial prices.

We named our first car from Kimo's "Gerald", affectionately, and Gerald is a girl. Gerald didn't even make it through the first week. We pulled into the Whole Foods parking lot one day, and the mechanism that held the trunk closed broke off completely. We bungied it closed, drove back to Kimo's, and traded poor Gerald for Lulein, a blue toyata with a front wheel bearing problem. She was already missing a hubcap, and Amy broke off one of the door handles before we gave her back, but we took her on the South Road to Hana, and she did just great! (All the rental agreements say you can't drive the south road in the rental cars, the road is one lane and not paved, but I think everybody just does it anyway. Almost every car we passed on the South Road was a rental.)

Our final Maui car, and my favorite, we called Pearl. Peral is an '83 Mercedes Benz that runs on deisel and B20 biofuel. We rented her from a spacey hippy lady who lives in Paia, for $100 a week. Mikey and I wanted the Benz for sentimental reasons, as we both miss his old Mercedes (he looks really great driving those things, hee hee). After we got the car, however, the lady told us that she'd NEVER changed the brakepads.

The moral of the story here is a message that KEEPS appearing to me on this trip:

You Get What You Pay For!

Aloha to you all!