Things I will not miss about Hawaii

As many of you already know, I've been back in Kansas City for one week and we are pretty much moved in to our new house. I've neglected this little blog since it pains me to think that the Hawaiian vacation is all over. To cheer me up, I thought I'd review the things I will NOT miss about living in Hawaii.

Hawaii is incredibly expensive. I've never been much of a price shopper and I mainly notice the total of my grocery bill more than the price of individual items. However when milk is $8.00/gallon, even I notice. It was up to $10.00/gallon in some stores when we left. Luis and I walked through Costco a few days ago and it was like a fire sale compared to Hawaii. Gas was around $4.50/gallon and it's a driving island, getting around without a car is not possible unless you are in downtown Honolulu. Even Subway's $5.00 footlong was $5.99 in Hawaii. I only know that because in those annoying commercials with the "Five, five dollar, five dollar footlooo-ooong" song, it flashed at the bottom: "It's $5.99 in Hawaii!" Yes, with the exclamation point and everything.

Oahu is a very crowded little island. People are everywhere all the time. There are some deserted beaches but you might get robbed if you hang out there. Every store is crowded at every hour of the day. Here in Kansas City you can run into a Walgreen's at 2:00 in the afternoon and pick up a few personal items and see, maybe, 5 people. Not so on Oahu. Every time I went to a Long's Drugstore, or the Safeway, or Costco (yes they have Costco on Oahu) there were hundreds of people, or so it seemed.

Then there is the traffic, oh there is the traffic. Oahu is by far the most populated of the islands and a lot of the population is moving west where the affordable housing is. Unfortunately the jobs are still primarily in Honolulu. Rush hour starts around 5:30 am in the morning and about 3:30 pm in the afternoon. Entire days have to be planned around the tides of traffic on H-1 since it is often the only way to get from point A to point B.

Oahu is disadvantaged by a couple of things when it comes to traffic planning. First there is that whole island thing. Can't build a road in the ocean. Then there are other geographical challenges such as gulches, mountains, Pearl Harbor, etc. The midwest with it's unlimited amounts of level land has sprawl because we can. Oahu has sprawl even though it's unwieldy and unsustainable. Which brings me to the other primary problem, short-sighted developers and local government. The communities and small cities that have sprung up to accommodate all these folks moving west are planned in exactly the same way that, for example, Olathe was planned. There are large housing developments with a separate area for strip malls and big box retailers. Feeder roads connect them to each other and to the highway. The big difference is the in Hawaii, there is only one feeder road because of the aforementioned geographical challenges. The result is not just the endless traffic lights like at 119th and Roe but also bottlenecks that cannot be resolved.

I'm sure there are other things I will not miss about Hawaii but now I've started thinking about all the things I miss so terribly so I'll go unpack a box to distract myself.