25 miles in our rented F-150 pickup truck
Home: Hale Naupaka AirBNB

Our original plan for departing Kona (before the ocean bashed and sliced us up) was to ride to camp at Ho’okena Beach Park. Lack of availability there had caused us to extend our stay in Kona by a day (a rigmarole that required our hostess calling AirBNB, and us changing to a different room in the house), only to find out more than a day after we’d booked a site that their online availability calendar was meaningless and they in fact had nothing for us. “Thanks for nothing, jerks!” is what we thought at the time, but now we were quite thankful to have an extra day in Kona to recuperate.

I rode out to Safeway to collect additional wound dressings (Rett’s toe, hip, and hand each required multiple rebandagings a day), and then figured out how to acquire a vehicle that could carry us and our bikes the rest of the way around the island back to Hilo. If we had zero other options, we probably could have continued on our bikes, but dealing with our wounds amidst the heat and sweat of the roadside would have been incredibly unpleasant, if not biologically risky.

Luckily, Kona is the tourist center of the island, with the main airport, and thus, all the rental car places. Even though we had flown into Hilo, weeks ago we booked our flight back to the mainland departing from Kona, for which we had planned to take the bikes with us on a bus from Hilo. Though Bob had previously overruled that idea and said he would drive us, an act of generosity big enough to make me uncomfortable accepting it. Renting a vehicle in Kona meant that we could drive ourselves back to Bob & Paloma’s place near Hilo (still making all the stops we’d planned with our bikes), box up the bikes there, and then return on our own with the truck to the Kona airport. In other words, we couldn’t have picked a better place on the island to lose our ability to ride our bikes.

As an additional bonus, the awesome Swiss college girls we’d been living with for the last five days were flying out of Kona this day, so while riding my bike the 10 miles to the Alamo Rent-a-Car wouldn’t have been impossible, hitching a ride with them instead was a level of generosity that was easy for me to accept. I went with the more-premium Alamo over the cheaper options because we very much needed them to give us an actual pickup truck. I know that even 30 years after the Seinfeld episode, a “reservation” in the rental car world still holds far less meaning than most people assume, but I figured I’d have a better chance of negotiating a workable solution to reservation-failure with Alamo than I would at Budget. However, it turned out that the picking up the pickup I’d reserved was fast and completely painless, at least in part because I arrived in a window where no planes had recently disgorged an army of new arrivals to descend on the counter. Since we don’t have our own car insurance, I signed up for Supplemental Liability Coverage through my American Express credit card for an extra fee.

The Ford F-150 was definitely a monster, but what a luxury to travel the hot Hawaiian highway inside an air-conditioned box! On the drive back I stopped at a U-Haul store to “rent” a big bag of moving blankets, to help protect the truck and bikes from whatever “rack” system I could come up with (I went with “front wheels hooked over the tailgate”, a setup that bike shops sell purpose-built pads/straps for these days, and then a bunch of ropes to hold them tight and upright).

We had booked our first two nights out of Kona before our accident, so now they seemed laughably close when traveling at speeds 5 times faster than we’d assumed. The first was an AirBNB 25 miles south. This time we took the main highway to Captain Cook, and it in fact would have been a cycling nightmare, and was the first instance of “traffic” we’d encountered on the island.

This sounds like a patently false story that a punchably-annoying anti-car zealot would make up about himself, but I can honestly say that I had difficulty physically pushing down the gas pedal. A specific muscle on the right side of my shin that must be used nearly-exclusively for that purpose has apparently atrophied from disuse, and it kept cramping up. Thankfully traffic opened up and cruise control was able to come to my rescue. I guess I should no longer scoff at the losers who like to show how much more-manly they are than us by stomping on their little pedal while we grind up giant hills with everything we own strapped to our bikes. Apparently pushing a gas pedal does take more strength than pedaling a bike all day long!

Our standalone unit behind the owners’ main house was little more than a shack, but it was designed and decorated so stylishly that the gaps around the plumbing pipes (through which you could see straight to the dirt below) simply added to the charm. With the shower outside the front door and the bamboo trim inside, it was a quintessentially Hawaiian place. Thus the absolutely giant TV was as unexpected as it was perfect for Rett’s continued recuperation. 1200 feet up on the gradual but inexorable slope of Mauna Loa, it provided a perspective of the sunset over the ocean that I’d never seen before. Unfortunately getting Rett up and out the 20 steps to see it would have incurred a cost not worth the benefit.