Today we start on our newest Palauan adventure - we are finally doing a live aboard. Of course, I’m a little anxious as I badly sprained my left ankle (left!) exactly two weeks before. It’s down in size, but still a little sore, so I will not be diving all willy-nilly crazy like. So I think. But there is over a week here, so who knows what will happen.
Last summer, pretty much right after 1L year ended, we came to Palau and dove with Fish ’n’ Fins. We fell in love with their day skiffs, and with the professional service - so much better than our trip here over Christmas 2013. Right now I cannot seem to find any of the blog pages, and I’m relatively positive that I did blog - I had a lot to say (bad) about our two nights at the Carolines Resort, a lot to say (good) about Tova and her dive operation, and just a relative feeling of contentment at being finished with my first year of law school. I hope I didn’t lose the pages, but when I tanked the MacBook, I may have lost more than a bit. I will have to see if I have a clone of the Air anywhere that I can use to restore the missing pages.
We arrived at HNL sufficiently early to be able to have a leisurely lunch. Kona Brewing Company is no longer operating a pub in the airport (insert sad face), but its replacement eatery was just fine. I got great news while we were there - I am now officially on the Board of Directors of Family Programs Hawaii. They are a wonderful group that helps out our keiki who are in the foster care system. It seems like it was a unanimous vote, but a lot of the influence comes from one of my mentors, Mei Nakamoto, a family lawyer who has been on the Board for several years. Our first board meeting is in July, I can’t wait to jump in and get my feet wet. We got to the club and updated our iDevices (excluding the new Apple watches, they are pretty much up to date and utterly AMAZING). While we were waiting, I got some messages from Jodi (we are diving with them again this summer, yeah!). It turns out that Matt’s bag was the victim of a gate delay (so we thought), and so I checked to see whether it was on the plane with us. It turns out that it hadn’t made the original flight from Houston to Honolulu, The cultprit probably being TSA.
Anyway, the flights over were unremarkable - standard jumbo jet kind of stuff. A longish layover in Guam was nice, there was time to charge up devices, download some stuff, and maintain some communications.
Finally, after a longish day, we made it to Palau and were greeted at the airport. Our driver was waiting with a sign, ready to whisk us away to the DW Motel. This is our first time staying here, it is a little stark, but clean, comfortable beds, a decent shower, and the air conditioning works. And they had the cutest little towel animals on the bed when we got here. :) We wlll be spending the next week sleeping on the ocean, though, and we are very looking forward to that.
I’m still moderately obsessing over the last trip to Palau and the non existent blog. Maybe I just didn’t do one? I’ll have to find out for certain.
Anyway, alii Palau, we can’t wait to kick off our trip here tomorrow morning!
