Sun 'n Saks: Out of Towners

Pleasantly freed from the stresses of planning, I started my third day on the island with what else?

Kidding. I didn't play videogames all day. We went to the beach too.

Okay, so I was also looking for a good spot to hold our welcome brunch, too. I guess one can never fully escape.

Sak somehow ran off with his family then - and I didn't see him for the rest of the day. Instead, I met guests as they arrived, even dragging my poor friends to the Honolulu Zoo the moment they stepped off the plane.

And of course, out-of-town bags were distributed, along with some leis.

Some of the bags we handed out personally, and others we left with friendly hotel bell-hops.

For dinner, we found our officiant, his family and my uncle. I ate cold noodles, not realizing I'd soon be sick of eating them in Japan.

I found Sak again the next day, and we grabbed our friends and hopped on a bus to Hanauma Bay - a preserved cove area teeming with fish.

We checked back in time to meet more friends with incoming flights, and passed out out-of-town bags.

To put it simply - the out-of-town bags were a good use of our time, and the contents did not go to waste.

One friend popped open the Tylenol within seconds of receiving her bag. Must have been a stressful flight. Another friend ate all his snacks within a ten minute period. My dad used uh, more than one pack of tums after those delicious Portuguese sausages. Several guests reused their water bottles throughout their stay. And the band-aids.

Well, I should have put more band-aids in the kits.

Coral is pretty sharp there - eh? And to my delight - more than one person was surprised at the "bonus" sparkly band-aid. Muahahaha.

If you have the time and resources - I highly, highly recommend creating out-of-town bags for your travelling guests. I promise that they will appreciate them!

It was really surreal to have my friends in Hawaii, on vacation with me. I typically only see them at conventions, so it was quite a different setting. We ate dinner together that night:

We did some fire bending:

And some water bending:

And as we walked down Waikiki Beach, we re-enacted the Bojangles scene from one of my favorite movies - Moonchild.

And otherwise acted like our crazy selves.

But eventually the night dwindled down, as they were all tired from their flights. We finished with some fruit smoothies in the Waikiki International Marketplace:

Muscle Office Special sounds interesting.

And eventually we crashed. Or at least Sak did.

Tomorrow would mark the last day of our lives as singles.