Tag: sun

Vacation Post: Chelan, Washington

~ K ~ 1 Comment

It has taken me a few days to get out of work mode and into vacation mode.  We are staying about 3.5 hours (driving time) from our house which results in hotter weather with clear blue skies.  As you have probably gathered from past blog posts, the western Washington area is usually cloudy, wet, and cool (55-65 degrees F).  However, once you drive over Snoqulamie Pass and enter the eastern side of the state, you get hot, dry desert weather.  We now have high 80s to low 90s, clear blue skies.  Did I mention blue skies?  Yeah, we can see the sun here.

Now, summer is the best time to be in Seattle because the cloudy skies are really now blue skies.  The weather is good.  The new channel is teasing us with reports of sunshine and temperatures of 70-80.

The Lake Chelan area is beautiful.  It use to be just apple orchard country, mixed in with some cherries, and then a sprinkle of vacation condo resorts (lots of timeshares here).  Over the past 15 years, Chelan has added about 23 wineries and more tourist activities such as ziplines, jet skis and boat rentals, etc.  There is a great and affordable family waterslide park called “Slidewaters”.  Great local pizza joints and hamburger places.  Heck, and there is sunshine every darn day!

300 days of sunshine…you can’t complain about that especially when it comes with a 55 miles long lake with clear blue water.

Hawaii Life TV Show

~ K ~ 4 Comments

Yesterday, I managed to watch another episode of the TV show “Hawaii Life”.  This one involved a former pro surfer who was moving back to Oahu (Hawaii).  Oahu is called the “Gathering Place” island and roughly 85% of the state’s population lives on Oahu.  That is about 850,000 people.  As you can figure out, the State of Hawaii has about 1 million people.  This doesn’t include the tourist population that is coming and going throughout the year.

Now, you might now that my parents still live on the island of Kauai (know as the Garden Isle) and that I lived there for a while in my youth.  I attended Kapa’a High School on Kauai.

When you tell people you went to school in Hawaii, everyone thinks it must have been totally awesome.  Warm weather, the beach, the kick back lifestyle.

As a teenager, it wasn’t as fun as you can imagine.  I’m a haole boy (a Caucasian) so I got picked on.  Part of the problem I was a big kid, not fat mind you, just physically big.  I swam, mountain biked, and lifted weights (me Incredible Hulk, me strong…not really).  I was a pretty good target for local boys that didn’t like haoles.

Not all of my experience on Kauai was bad.  I did have some great friends and did a lot of fun activities.  I was just careful on where I went and who I was hanging out with.  If I had my big Hawaiian friends, I was able to go to some rougher areas.  If I was with my haole friends, we went to the more public beaches.

When I watch the “Hawaii Life” show, I enjoy it.  The show “Hawaii Life” is well done.  It is fun to see sunshine, surf, and the beaches here in the comfort of my Seattle home.  Hawaii is a wonderful place and after watching this type of show I get a bit homesick.  The weather looks wonderful, the beaches look inviting, and the family (buying the house) appears to be very happy.

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To combat my feelings of moving back, I quickly watch a few episodes of “Dog the Bounty Hunter”.  Nothing like Dog chasing down some meth head or bail jumper to snap me back into reality and wake me up!  The reality being that Hawaii is like everywhere else.  Sure, you have great weather but you also have drugs and crime, good times and bad times.  Life is what you make of it.

In the meantime, I plan to whine about not living in Hawaii and not buying a house like the folks on “Hawaii Life”.  Boo hoo.  Poor me!  What am I going to do.  Perhaps I should start a donation site in which people (like yourself) could contribute to my family’s move back to Kauai.  What do you think about that?