We stopped at the Princeville Airport to check out the helicopters.  This helicopter reminds me of the flies in Kenya.

With not enough room in the little car for three of us with Julie’s luggage, I arranged for a shuttle to pick her up at the airport for her 9:00 pm arrival last night.

Wouldn’t you know, Julie calls me from the airport in Lihue to tell me her shuttle drive had been canceled by someone named Mike. Go figure. Who’s Mike? I never canceled her shuttle.

We drove to the local airport to check out the helicopters. We’ve considered touring the island in a helicopter, but not quite sure we will do so.

Luckily, her flight was only six hours from Los Angeles. Can you imagine the frustration if it had been on a red-eye with 12 hours or more of flight and layover times only to find there was no transportation to one’s final destination? 

Although, we’ll never figure out what had happened and, I did see a credit on my credit card this morning and the fact she arrived safely by taxi, she wasn’t too much worse for the wear, arriving safely at 10:15 pm, after only a 15-minute delay at the airport. Oh, stuff happens.

This helicopter was being repaired. I don’t know if that’s a good sign or a bad sign.

It even happens with the most meticulously arranged plans that are made with the best intentions, only to go awry, often not due to anything we could have prevented on our end. It’s all a part of traveling, whether it’s a one week trip from LA to Kauai or part of a many year’s long journey such as ours, a journey to “everywhere.”

Although I must admit, we’ve been very lucky on most of our travel days finding everything to be as we’d planned and hoped to be. Traveling isn’t easy when one realizes it’s a series of events that must transpire in a timely sequential pattern with little room for variances with errors often caused by a human or mechanical error. 

Tom spotted these two chickens. “Must have been a double yolker,” Tom clucked as I laughed.

Even mechanical error is most often a result of human error, carelessness, or unintended negligence. Stuff happens.

That’s not to say that we’ve forgotten about the knife someone placed in our plastic bin when we went through security in Barcelona on May 1, 2013. Click here for photos and the details of that event.

We’ve wanted to check out the local airport available for charters only.

Then, there was the time our duffel bag, filled with over the counter vitamins, was confiscated by ship’s security in Belize City when we boarded the Carnival Liberty on April 9, 2013, which we posted on April 10th. We were treated as if we were drug dealers. Click here for that post with photos for Part One of Harrowing Experience, with Part Two the following day.

The Princeville Ranch is near the airport offering horseback rides, zip-lining, and other adventure outings.

It goes on and on; storms at sea, unexpected delays, last-minute flight changes. The situations are unavoidable. But, from many of these, we have changed the way we handle those travel days. Mainly, we’ve begun to assume that stuff will happen, not to be negative, instead, to be emotionally prepared.

The ranch’s horses were saddled and ready to go.

When all is running smoothly again, we feel lucky, fortunate, blessed with what we now call, “safari luck.” For those of our readers, new to our site let me explain “safari luck.

In the first 10 hours, while we were on safari in the Masai Mara in Kenya, we saw and took photos of the “Big Five,” the treasured and revered sightings of every safari attendee which includes the: Cape buffalo, lion, rhino, elephant and leopard.

Tom doesn’t care to horseback ride although I would and I wouldn’t care to zip line and Tom would.  We do neither, old-timers that we are. With my bad spine, it’s not worth taking any risks and be injured. Where would we go to recuperate, having no home?

Since that time in October 2013, we’ve called any good fortune we experience as “safari luck” of which we’ve had our fair share, even amid a plethora of oddball or difficult scenarios, managing to work our way through, grateful for a good outcome.

Speaking of grateful, we’re excited that Julie is here with us now. Most certainly, the next eight days will be packed with lots of sightseeing and lots of laughing, much of which we’ll share here each day.

This building is a part of the former Princeville Golf Club which has been closed for a few years. Recently, a billionaire investor from China purchased the property and will be developing a huge high-end housing development of homes, restaurants, and golf.

Thanks for reading our mindless drivel. Hopefully, over the next several days, we’ll ramp it up!

Happy Friday!

                                             Photo from one year ago today, March 13, 2014:

One year ago, we went out to dinner in the city in Marrakech, outside the Medina, and posed for this photo with the restaurant owner. For more details, please click here.