There are few places in the world that have received more accolades from the travel industry than Hawaii. One of the most remarkable things about Hawaii is that this has been the case for years, yet there appears to be no burn out. There is no significant "Hawaii: Should have seen it ten years ago!" chorus. Oh, I'm sure you could find someone who feels that way, but for the most part nobody would ever sniff at a trip to Hawaii. Maui, and often some combination of the others, consistently appears in the annual Top 10 Islands list by Conde-Nast Traveler. If you were to poll the general population for their dream vacation destination, I'd wager Hawaii would come out on top in a plurality, if not take an outright majority.

Hawaii deserves it. If you have been to the Caribbean and think it is the ultimate in tropical beauty, you are wrong. There are wonderful, must-see places in the Caribbean, but by virtually any measure, Hawaii is noticeably better. With the possible exception of Honolulu, every other vacation destination in the world could take a lesson from Hawaii on balancing natural beauty and civilization.

Take for example, Kauai and Maui, which were my destinations...but wait! I'm getting ahead of myself. We have to start off with a travel industry rant, don't we? Alrighty then.

Probably the most annoying recent development in airline ticket pricing (maybe not so recent anymore) is the notion of restricted fares -- specifically, fares that are not eligible for upgrades. The result for someone like me, who accumulates a ton of miles and wants to use them for upgrading to first class on long flights, is that those sweet discount fares you are offered are pointless; you will be sitting in coach and that's that.

See, I am of the mind that the best use of flyer miles is for upgrades because that's where the most value added is. You'll readily find relatively inexpensive coach tickets, but when you look for full fare first-class tickets the price often skyrockets to triple the coach fare. Since you typically need about the same number of miles for a free coach ticket as you would to upgrade from coach to first, unless the first class ticket is less than double the coach price, there is more value to be gained in the upgrade.

Well, it seems airlines are on to that clever little piece of logic, so what they offer are cheap fares for coach, but they restrict them from upgrades. You can get unrestricted fares, but they'll cost more. The bottom line is that if you want to fly coach and upgrade, you're going to have to pay a premium for the right to upgrade. I find this somewhat disingenuous. Yes, I'm sure all the legalese makes it clear that upgrades are from unrestricted coach only, but come on. That's like Best Buy advertising prices after mail-in rebates. The intended impression is only very indirectly connected to reality. The net result of it all is that all those points and miles you turn back flips to accumulate become worth a little less. The airlines giveth and the airlines taketh away.

This is particularly relevant here because I had a restricted coach seat on an 8-hour leg from Chicago to Honolulu, and I could not upgrade. For those of you who know me, I will now pause while you re-read that in disbelief. And believe me when I tell you I tried every trick in the book to get around the restriction. No dice. I almost cancelled the flight because of that. Even Hawaii isn't worth spending eight hours trying to claim two square inches of armrest from the fat guy next to me while guarding my knees against getting hammered when the guy in front of me does a power recline, I told myself. Then someone who knows me well told me sarcastically, "Oh my God! Only you would cancel a week in Hawaii because you had to fly coach!" She was right. I was about to cancel a trip to the most storied vacation destination in the world for no other reason than I have become such a spoiled little sissy in my old age. I decided to gut it out. I also decided to drug myself to sleep during the flight.

The flight was on United, which has an interesting option of something called Economy Plus seating. For a small fee (about hundred dollars, Rainman), you can upgrade from Economy (coach) to Economy Plus, which gets you more leg room and priority boarding and deplaning. I splurged.

Here's a tip. Check Seat Guru to find out where the best seats are. The plane I was on, I discovered, was one of the few where the exit rows are not desirable. The seats don't recline. If I didn't know that, I might have blindly asked for an exit row hoping for more legroom and cursed myself from my upright position the entire way there. Seat Guru goes into the travel bookmarks.

Here's another tip. Exactly twenty-four hours before your flight is scheduled to leave, you can check-in on line (this is true of all major airlines). I'm pretty sure that is also the point where they free up any seats that they have been saving for contingencies. So go to your computer at 23:59 before departure and check in. If you're lucky like me not only will you get an aisle seat (that's a must for a long flight) but you can get a bulkhead seat and have roughly as much leg room as you would have in first class. (I rule!)

So in the end, my horrible 8-hour coach leg was not all that horrible. With the backward-ass logic of airlines, you can get something similar to first class for less than the premium you would have paid to be given the privilege of using your miles to get into first class. Brilliant.

The movie, however, was Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants; a deeply painful sight. So I still had to drug myself to sleep.

While we're on the topic of airlines, in the course of scurrying about the islands I had four legs on Aloha Airlines inter-island commuters. Every one of these flights was off the ground and landed without a second's delay. Plus, in the matter of a half hour flight time, you get some tasty mango/pineapple juice thingy and super friendly attendants. The planes are run down, but the airline seems exceedingly well run.

Finally on the ground in my first stop, Kauai, I picked up my rental car: a purple PT Cruiser convertible. That made me smile. Could there be a more perfect vehicle for tooling around on Kauai? Actually, there could, but it would have had to give me night vision because it was dark when I got arrived and I got lost almost as soon as I hit the road. The primary reason for this is that I am male and therefore congenitally incapable of asking for directions -- well, asking anyone other than Mapquest that is. The secondary reason is that the folks at Thrifty rental have less than clear ways of explaining how to get to your destination. "Take a left, take another left, then a left towards Poipu (Poh-ee-poo) and follow the signs," was technically accurate, but incomplete. I maintain the intervening intersections between the lefts should have been taken into account when reciting directions. Maybe that's just me.

Even as I neared Poipu, as soon as I got off the main drag, I was lost again. Hawaiians seem to have had no use for the concept of a grid when it came to road planning. So you end up vectoring off in random, counterintuitive directions while trying to keep track of the general direction of your destination. Furthermore, the condo I had rented was in the heart of some equally randomly vectored unlit side streets.

Had it been daytime, this might have been interesting introduction to the island. Getting lost is not necessarily bad when you are traveling. But in the pitch black night with me going on close to twenty four hours with only fitful sleep in a plane seat, it just pissed me off.

No, that's wrong. It is pretty much impossible to be truly pissed off on Kauai. It's not like the real world. The night is always beautiful. The ocean is just a few minutes away should you need a soothing wave noise generator. You could pull you car over and curl up and sleep in a ditch and you'd still be in Hawaii.

Poipu Beach Plantation is a dandy place. Technically these are rental condos, but the place is run a lot more like to a hotel. I was able to check in for just three nights (some require as long as a week's stay), there is housekeeping service every third day. At the rental office they have all beach chairs and umbrellas and sunscreen and guide books and all that sort of stuff, just sitting out freely available. I arrived late, so they just hung my key on the bulletin board with a note to direct me to the right unit.

Roomy, open, clean, full kitchen, separate bedroom and living room -- they even spread flowers around in honor of my arrival; a definite Asian influence to the d‚cor and a little sign out front asking you to remove your shoes before entering. The only bad thing I can say is that I think they may have been having a slight problem with Mister Roach. The first couple of nights I found a dead one on the floor of the bathroom and noted a couple of roach traps set out in inconspicuous places, but that may have been temporary. The grounds are well manicured and there is a hot tub. It's a good, economical alternative to the steeply priced resorts.

Poipu Beach Plantation is situated on a quiet side street off the beach road. You can walk to Poipu Beach Park in about ten minutes. Or drive if you are carrying a ton of beach stuff -- parking appears to be plentiful. There is nothing at all bombastic about Poipu Beach. It is a smallish beach leading into a lagoon that's well protected from the ocean waves. It's a bit rocky, but very safe for little kids. You can snorkel right off the shore and swim out maybe fifty yards to a little sandbar. No crowds; gazebos in the adjacent park for picnicking; a restaurant and snack bar across the lightly traveled street. It reminds me of the little beaches that you occasionally find are the various little lakes in Michigan. Families milling about, sunning and picnicking; no one doing anything remotely strenuous (apart from the occasional surfer well out into the ocean).

Poipu contains a few big but unostentatious resorts, a handful of nice restaurants, a middling shopping mall and a little historic village, Koloa, with the expected shops and pizza parlors and so forth. Commercially, the entire area of Poipu reminds me of any one of a number of little towns in the Midwest. It is a deeply chilled-out place, even for Hawaii.

In fact, the entire south shore of Kauai is pretty much pure chill. Heading west from Poipu, the next town of any significance is Waimea. I'm guessing the number of Waimeas in the islands may reach the double digits. The most famous is Waimea on the north shore of Oahu. This Waimea is at the entrance to Waimea Canyon, Kauai's prime natural attraction (apart form the ocean) and often called "the Grand Canyon of the Pacific". Well, it really doesn't hold a candle to the Grand Canyon, but it looked to be a fine place to do some hiking and nature loving. The drive up through Waimea Canyon to the park center is pretty darn scenic in itself. There are plenty of points to pull over and gaze into the depths of the valleys and see the reed-thin waterfalls plunging hundreds of feet to the floor of the canyon.

Experienced outdoors types will appreciate this next bit. I eventually reached a parking area and ranger station which serves as the starting point from many hiking paths through the park. My plan was to hike to Waipoo Falls. My early start for the day got me there about an hour before the station opened. No chance of getting a trail guide. Well, OK the trails are supposed to be well marked so I looked at and tried to memorize what could only be considered a cartoon rendition of a trail map that was attached to a sign in from of one of the buildings.

After a short drive to the start of the trail I opened the trunk to retrieve my day hikers only to find forgot to put my day hikers in the trunk. Great -- I'm wearing sandals. No way was I going to drive all the way back out of Waimea Canyon and back to Poipu to get my shoes. I looked down the trail and it was more like a dirt road than an actual trail, so I told myself I would hike a little way down it in my sandals and if things got too rough I would just turn back. (A boy scout would politely point out that it is not recommended to hike in open-toed shoes.)

So off I went, cruising merrily along. The trail eventually did turn into an actual trail, but it was pretty well maintained so I kept on. I went on for about 20 minutes all of which was downhill. Eventually a came to the intersection of three different trails, none of which I remembered from my look at the cartoon map on the ranger station wall. There had been so many switchbacks that I was not completely sure of which general direction was correct, and no one thought to put a "to Waipoo Falls" marker on any of three trails. (A boy scout would lecture me about the importance of having a map and compass even for casual hiking.)

Well, I don't give up easy, even when I should. I picked one trail and barreled away, again following it for about twenty minutes until it ended in a very nice scenic overlook that I couldn't waste time enjoying because I had foolishly picked the wrong trail and had to turn back.

Down the second trail. This trail was a little more difficult to follow and tended to edge along some fairly imposing precipices. It also went on for quite a ways. After about a half hour I was cheered a bit because I was drawing closer to the sound of falling water. I picked up my pace -- still going steadily downhill. I pulled off my shirt because the morning sun had warmed up enough to make me sweat like a pig and, naturally, I had not brought along any water. (A boy scout would rail at me for being so stupid as to not bring water.)

I am, by nature, impatient in these sorts of situations. Throughout my life, I have often found that when I am trying to reach a landmark in a strange place and it doesn't appear readily I immediately think I made a wrong turn somewhere. Usually I end up backtracking only to find that if I had just continued on a little further, I would have found what I was looking for. As a result I have conditioned myself to suppress my impatient instincts and just keep going. So that's what I did, even though the running water sound that justified my continuing faded away after a while. (At this point, a boy scout would give me the finger and walk away, grateful that I was unlikely to survive to pollute the gene pool.)

I told myself that I should start memorizing landmarks on the trail so I could find my way back, and in doing, also finally realized that I was being an idiot. I sat on a rock. The sun was now well up and it was starting to get tropical hot. The way back was going to uphill the whole time. No water, flimsy footwear. I gave myself about a 50-50 chance of getting back without either blowing out a sandal strap and twisting an ankle or accidentally kicking a rock and busting my toe or fainting from dehydration or getting eaten by a bear. (Admittedly that last one would be very unlikely since there are no bears in Hawaii, except for in zoos. But this is the kind of stuff that happens in the wilderness.) What's worse, it occurred to me that I had not seen a single person on the trail since I started. No one would realize I was gone until they stumbled across my rotting carcass three weeks hence. I turned back.

It may surprise you to find I did not, as it turns out, die a lonesome death in the Hawaii wilderness. When I finally made my way back to the dirt road that started this whole adventure, I encountered a number of hikers walking in the opposite direction. All of them had maps, water, and sturdy shoes. Wussies.

I sat for a moment in my nice purple PT Cruiser convertible; sweating, frustrated. But the good thing about traveling west is that everything is time-shifted to the morning. You wake up late by your internal clock and get on the road only to discover it's really about before 6AM, an hour I haven't seen since, well, since the last time I was this far west. So with the major portion of the day still ahead of me, I abandoned the wilderness, headed back to Poipu, showered and changed, cursed my day hikers for having spent a comfortable morning at home sitting next to my bed, and I still had time for an afternoon exploration.

(A brief commercial plug for Ecco sandals. They hung together through all the misuse I put them through on this trip, saving me from being eaten by a grizzly.)

If you divide Kauai into the four directions they break down as follows: In the east in the main city of Lihue. This is where the airport is and where you will likely start your trip. From there a majority of visitors will head to the north coast. This is the primary area of tourist development and there are some legendary and very expensive hotels and resorts up in and around the city of Princeville.

The south shore is behind the north in development and but there are still plenty of fine places to stay, it just seems a bit more low key and spread out. This is where Poipu is, and I never encountered any volume of traffic. There are fewer shops and such, but it's not the boondocks by any stretch.

The further west you go, either from the north or south, the less developed things get. Keep going west along the coast and the road turns to dirt...then disappears entirely. You cannot circle the island by road.

So my next target was the north shore. It's not a trivial undertaking to get there. Kauai is not that big in diameter, but like all the Hawaii islands, human activity takes place primarily around the edges, which is to be expected considering they are all only volcanoes that happen to peak over the top of the ocean. Why climb a volcano when you can hang on the beach. The result is to get anywhere, you pretty much have to circle the island, there is no cutting across. So it is long ride from south shore to north shore, taking you through Lihue, which means traffic, to Princeville, which means more traffic. Now we're not talking real world levels of traffic, but given the severely restricted road system, it does build up. Bottom line: I didn't really get to the north shore until roughly dinner time, so I didn't have that much time to look around. From what I did see, it reminded me a bit of Hilton Head, definitely upscale and a bit stripmally, but nice strip-mally. I think I need to spend more time up there, next trip for sure.

Just like that, I was down to my last full day in Kauai. The next morning was filled with swimming and snorkeling of Poipu beach. Much of the south shore has very rocky bedding, making wading out a bit difficult, but slap on a mask and snorkel and you're golden. The fish, used to getting fed, do not hesitate to swarm about you; the water is warm and buoyant. The biggest concern you have is sunburn.

The previous night at dinner I had picked up one of those free tabloids that you find around vacation havens and in this one, they rated the top beaches in Kauai. Number one was Queens Pond Beach, a highly inaccessible, exceptionally long strip of sand at quite literally the end of the road on the far western shore. So I off I headed west again. I stopped for lunch in Waimea, at a place called Barefoot Burger, and had a burger and a conversation with a woman who moved there with her husband but now had to move back to the mainland, because her husband needed a form of health care that just wasn't available in the islands. "At least I had a couple of years in paradise."

I got one of those twinges of envy. A vision came to me of a life without striving and motivation; a life of appreciation of the moment and the air and the water, without the constant dwelling on what's next and how much time is left. A little house in a tiny surfing town on the south shore; a job in a friendly little burger joint; never adorned by more than a t-shirt, shorts and sandals. The windows always open. Living as a piece of the world, not constantly trying to stay on top of it or outthink it.

I'd last about a week before I was going through a pint of bourbon a day and obsessively gambling on-line, but still, it's a comforting thought.

The paved road ends a few miles before the entrance to Queen's Pond beach, so I took the purple PT Cruiser for a bit of off-roading. Having done this I am now categorically against RFID tags and other tracking devices since I don't think Thrifty Car Rental would have taken too kindly to that. It's a Civil Rights issue; Constitutional privacy and all.

Park your car at the end of the road and to get to Queen's Pond Beach you have to surmount a healthy sized sand dune, but you are greeted with a remarkable sight: a long stretch of wide pristine sand, bracketed by a rocky outcropping on one end and magnificent cliff wall on the other. You can read more here. It is very remote and lightly peopled. You also want to be very liberal in slathering on the sunscreen because there is no shade whatsoever.

I settled in and headed for the water to go in for a swim. The surf was a little rough and I found myself a little frightened. I've swam in much rougher water, but what worried me was that I was alone. There were other people in the far distance, looking like ants, but I pictured myself going for a swim, getting pulled offshore into the middle of the Pacific without anyone noticing. I would have been shark excrement long before anyone knew I was gone. Interesting. More or less the same thought I had while searching for Waipoo Falls.

Frankly, it pissed me off. I refuse to let irrational fears of mortality hinder my fun. Defiantly, I went in for a nice long swim. The water was indeed rough, the waves a bit crashy -- not like the rolling waves that I have encountered in Hawaii before (Maui specifically), but it was the warm buoyant Pacific, and I was not being dragged offshore to drown.

Once I did slog my way out of the surf, I was able to appreciate the real beauty of the place. It is movie-perfect. Tell your art director you want an expansive and deserted tropical beach and this is what they'll turn up. Even the heat was impressive. The uninterrupted stretch of white sand acted almost like a mirror, as if you were in a convection oven -- and I mean that in a good way. It is what I will keep in mind when I am stuck in the dire depth of a Michigan winter.

I felt very lucky. There are few people who ever get to see a place like this. Only a small fraction of the billions of people in the world ever get to visit Hawaii; a fraction of those come to Kauai; a fraction of those will ever make the trek to the far west end and Queen's Pond beach; and a fraction of those are me.

After making my way back to Poipu and spent my final evening in Kauai wandering along the beach road and having a plate of peel-and-eat shrimp and a beer at the beach bar. Like I said: pure chill.

Still on my early-riser schedule, I rose the next morning and dashed off for a final swim at Poipu. There is a small beach next to Poipu beach; a little crescent beach called Brennecke's which can't be more than 30 yards wide. Unlike Poipu, there is no barrier to the greater ocean, so the waves come crashing through in nice little curls. I quickly jogged across the street to the surf shop and rented myself a boogie board. The seabed is rocky and the water gets shallow quickly so after an hour-ish or so of riding I stumbled out of the surf with my ankles shredded, but a big smile on my face.

Kauai goes on the list of place to return to. There is certainly ample opportunity to do things, but I get the impression the island's real charms would only appear after an extended stay, when you could appreciate it from within it's casual rhythm instead of racing around in exploration.

Next up, Maui.

I had been to Maui before and had a good sense of the lay of the land. It is, of course, one of the most exquisite places on Earth. It is also one of the most upscale places on Earth. It is littered with resorts of some of the more renowned travel names: Four Seasons, Ritz-Carlton, etc. These are centered around the western and southwestern coasts and the pristine tourist town of Lahaina. I spent a good deal of time there in my last trip, and came to love the warm waters and soft sand, but this time I was staying in a place that is thought to be rife with the genuine spirit of Hawaii. A place called Hana.

Thrifty was fairly quick in setting me up with a Jeep Wrangler, although I had to work to resist the hard sell on liability insurance. Frankly, I think pushing liability insurance is a technical violation the spirit of Aloha. After pulling the top off the Jeep I stopped in the little beach town of Paia -- a sweet little place -- where a grabbed a couple of fish tacos at Charlie's, and swapped stories with a born and raised Ann Arborite bartender. Then, I made a headlong dash to the east to get through the jungle before dark.

Hana is on the far eastern point of the island and is accessible only via the Hana Highway (unless you can afford to hire a small plane). Driving the Hana Highway is a one of life's more interesting experiences; the road swerves and twists severely enough to seem like an extended version of Lombard St. that runs along a dramatic coast and through a rainforest. The road itself periodically narrows to a single lane, sometimes directly behind a blind corner. Theoretically, there are stop signs placed at either end of these narrow stretches, but it's not always easy to see if anyone is at the other stop sign, or even halfway through the single lane portion from your stopped position. It makes for a harrowing journey. Without the deeply ingrained friendliness of the islands, this would be the single most contentious place on earth. If it were populated by Manhattanites, there would be thousands of games of Chicken played out everyday. But this is Hawaii; the spirit of Aloha takes the day -- out of necessity in this case.

Of course all the white-knuckle moments are countered by unreal beauty. Simply indescribable. Around every turn is a striking coastline or a verdant waterfall or what could easily be a jungle location from an old Tarzan movie. It's every postcard of the exotic Pacific come to life. You can't imagine.

Countering that, though, are the abandoned car husks. Seriously. In the midst of this flawless tropical beauty, people leave their clearly nonfunctioning cars lying wedged partially into the jungle off the side of the road. Your first thought is, "why don't they clear these things off?" and then you remember the road and realize that it's probably not so minor a task to maneuver a standard tow truck to drag them away, but still some of them look like they have been there for years.

The other odd thing is the shacks. Now, I understand you don't really need a whole lot of shelter in Hawaii. You could probably get away for years with little more than a big beach umbrella. So I probably shouldn't be surprised that, along the Hana highway you periodically encounter what can only be called shantys. Make-shift shacks with trashy furniture out front and laundry hanging out from on any convenient extrusion. These are the housing equivalent of the clapped-out cars -- equally ugly. Yet here they are perched overlooking the ocean in the center of one of the most beautiful spots on Earth. It would almost certainly be some of the highest value real estate in existence. I can only assume these folks are squatters on public lands, because even if they didn't want to sell to some developer they could at least get an enough of an equity loan to replace their rusty lounge chairs.

I have dwelled on these bizarre oddities more than I should. I don't want to leave you with the impression that they are the dominant memory, it's just that stand out like sore thumbs in contrast to the relentless splendor of the other 99%. Maybe they are just there to make you appreciate it more.

Equally odd are the occasional gated driveways with scary "private property" or "keep out" or "beware of dog" signs, including one that just says "Go Home," in the most grotesque violation of Aloha I have ever encountered in Hawaii.

There is a nativist movement in Hawaii, formulated by folks who don't want to see the traditional Hawaiian way of life lost. Fair enough. But the truth is that Hawaiian nativists, like so many other nativists, appreciate and benefit modern Western culture. If they didn't they wouldn't have assimilated so much of it. No doubt there are a few who prefer living in grass huts and growing or catching their own food, telling tales of ancestors around the campfire, tending their poi dogs and having a life expectancy of 35; frankly there's nothing stopping those people from doing just that as far as I can see.

But the fact is, if you want the benefits of Western civilization -- the luxuries, the medicine, the entertainment, the safety, the choices -- you have to make some compromises. Hawaiians have done a tremendous job of this. No one who has visited Hawaii would not see cultural differences from the mainland, and those differences are a good deal greater than the differences between say Chicago and Tucson. This is what Hawaiians have done exceedingly well. Instead of building a fort around their culture and saying "go home", they saved the best of their culture and let the west have its way with the remainder. As a result you get (almost everywhere) a very infectious sense of warmth and an easy going rhythm that islands in, say, the Caribbean can only dream about.

As a perfect demonstration of that, I was acutely put out by the "Go Home" sign. Back home somebody could flip me off, or insult my mother, try to hard sell me on rental car insurance, and I would just ignore it or snap them back in their place and the forget it ever happened after about five minutes. In Hawaii, a sign that says "Go Home" seems horrendously injurious.

(This has nothing to do with the current drive for Hawaiian self-government, by the way. I am convinced that is an attempt to capture the same sorts of financial benefits that the Indians get with their casinos. Whoa, what a thought! If they had casinos and a sports book I might never leave. But that's another essay.)

If there is an appropriate ending place for the most beautiful road in the world, it is certainly Hana. Hana is basically a just a sweet little beach town that happens to be completely isolated from the rest of the island by an exquisite rainforest. If Poipu is pure chill, Hana is down around absolute zero.

It's really difficult to figure out where to start with Hana. Might as well start with description of where I stayed, Hana Kai condominiums. Better yet, I wrote about it for Hotel Chatter shortly after I returned so you can check that out. I also wrote about the single outstanding luxury resort located in Hana, the Hotel Hana, where I didn't stay but I did stop in for a look.

All the descriptions I can come up with make Hana sound prosaic, and in a way it is. Wandering the streets of the town you see no bombast or anything overtly commercial. It's like wandering around small town U.S.A. except with perfect weather. But then you stumble on to the crescent beach, with the outrigger canoes all lined up and ready and you grab some beach food from TuTu's sandwich shop, or you stop in at the "world famous" Hasegawa General Store which is like the stand in for the town square, and you realize it's not quite so ordinary.

Venturing past the village proper is where Hana comes into focus. My first foray beyond town was to Hamoa Beach, a spot which novelist James Michener, a fellow who had traveled extensively throughout the Pacific, declared one of the most beautiful he had even seen. I won't argue. It is a perfectly formed crescent shaped black sand beach. The waves are sizeable, but they roll in gently. It was midmorning and I had the place almost entirely to myself. There couldn't have been more than two or three other people who showed up all morning, and them only briefly, despite the fact the aforementioned Hotel Hana Resort maintains facilities here (meaning showers, towels and beach chairs for their guests). I can see why Michener liked the place so much; it is the picture of lush, quiet beauty one expects from the South Seas, it just happens to be located a bit further north.

Yet more tropical splendor is available further up the road at Haleakela Park. Here, I steeled myself for another hike. Luckily this one went a little better than the one in Waimea Canyon, I didn't get lost -- except for a couple of minutes when I wandered off the trail and found myself face to face with a decidedly unimpressed cow -- and I didn't risk life or limb by wearing my sandals.

It is an easy, well-marked, two-mile hike from roadside parking to Waimoku falls and it worth ten times that distance easily. In the course of the hike one passes seven pools, all of which are in lovely settings, some are easily swimmable -- in fact I would say swimming in at least one is required. Swimming in an exotic natural pool in the tropics is something that simply has to be done. The water is cool with the fresh smell of a woodland creek to it. Indescribably refreshing in the heat of Hawaii. Sadly, the hike is actively traversed so you'll need your bathing suit, but still an essential experience. I don't know if you are technically supposed to do this, but it also doesn't appear as if anyone is going to stop you.

Further up the trail awaits something more remarkable. First, you follow the path through an immense, and very eerie, bamboo forest. The bamboo grows quite high, blocking out most of the sun and you are walking through a cut out path as if you were walking down an alley between skyscrapers. Like so much else, it looks like something a film director ordered from the art department, in this case worthy of Indiana Jones.

Next up is rock-hopping across of a couple minor streams leading to a path that ends with you craning your neck back as far as possible and still not being able to make out the top of Waimoku falls. Like nature's Swiss shower, the crisp smelling water plunges over 500 feet slapping the rocks below loud enough to require raised voices.

You make your way across some big rocks to the surrounding pool, then across some extremely slippery underwater rocks to the point of impact and step in. The experience is like the first time you ran through the sprinkler as a toddler, or dove head first off the side of the pool as a child. It's a fresh blast of liquid energy that is about the perfect contrast to the heat and hike grime you've built up to get there. One of my very favorite experiences in all my travels. I've spoken in previous travel writings of the "vacation moment." Well, this was it.

The next morning I would backtrack my way out of Hana along the highway back to the Maui airport. There I would join a bunch of Islanders on the commuter flight from Maui to Oahu, all carrying boxes of Krispy Kremes (apparently Oahu has no Krispy Kreme so Islanders fly them back from Maui for their friends). From Oahu I would make my way to San Francisco and from there back to Detroit, no upgrades available.

But for the time being I let the falls pound down on me, standing under the drenching deluge for as long as I could. In time I sat on the big rocks and while the high Hawaii sun warmed me and dried me as subsequent hikers took their turns under the water. It was one of those perfect moments that inspire a sort of existential gratitude. Just like that moment on Queen's Pond beach in Kauai, I was once again struck by how fortunate I was. Gratitude: that is what is so special about Hawaii and why I am certain I will be back.

Even if I have to fly coach.