Christmas with Olivia and Caroline

Luis will be leaving soon to make the trip back to Kansas City to gather up his girls and bring them to Hawaii for spring break. He made a similarly grueling journey in December to collect them for the Christmas break. I picked up the three tired travelers at the airport with leis in hand. The girls were very excited to be here but less excited about the Christmas tree I fashioned out of one of the fake plants in the condo.
The first thing that the girls did upon arriving was change into summer clothes and hit the little beach by our condo. We were just going to show them the beach but the valuable lesson I've learned since being here is that you can never just show a kid a beach. Expecting a child to appreciate the aesthetic beauty of a beach without full immersion is futile. I've seen countless parents at the beach exhorting their child not to get wet or not to get too sandy, all in vain. It's like expecting a child to enjoy scenery or read Shakespeare.
We live next to and are actually part of a resort area called Ko Olina. There are four man made lagoons in Ko Olina where the sand is always soft and the ocean is always calm. Nothing bad can happen here and, not surprisingly, a Disney hotel will be added soon.
About a week into Christmas break, the lure of the beach wore off a little and the weather turned rainy so we went to the Dole Plantation. It used to be an actual plantation where pineapples were grown and processed. However, there were other islands with more desperate people willing to work for less money so the pineapples went there and the plantation has been converted from agriculture into a more lucrative tourist attraction. It's a big cheesy nightmare with the world's biggest maze and every possible pineapple product made but the girls enjoyed it.
Here is Caroline having a close encounter with a train. In our back yard, we not only have a beach, a park, a wedding chapel, and a luau, we also have a set of railroad tracks. I didn't realize they were functional tracks until we had been here a few days. Every Sunday a train goes by twice in the afternoon. It's a touristy looking thing so we decided to check it out while the girls were here. The railroad and train are maintained by the Hawaiian Railway Society which is composed entirely of elderly men who share an unhealthy interest in trains. The train ride itself was about 90 minutes long with constant narration by one of those elderly men who provided a stream of facts about trains interspersed with really stupid jokes. We will not be repeating the experience with future guests.

More Christmas with Olivia and Caroline to come in future posts.