27 miles in our rented F-150 pickup truck
Home: Green Sands Oasis

Just as I was about to get some sort of breakfast started, there was a knock on our door, and our hostess appeared with two plates of food for us! “Breakfast” might have been in the AirBNB listing (though despite being responsible for one of the “B”s in the name, that’s incredibly rare), and if so we’d forgotten. An even better part of the surprise was that it was some sort of chia-seed pudding, a dish that I think 90% of people would be completely unfamiliar with, including myself…if it wasn’t one of Rett’s breakfast mainstays! How did our hostess know?!

One problem with driving a truck when our planned stops were spaced anticipating a full day’s bike ride between them, is that very little time is killed in the transit. We would need to drive extremely slowly to make the 27 miles fill the five hours between check-out at one place and check-in at the next. And there was nearly no place to stop between them besides the Manuka State Wayside, so that’s where we stopped.

After making sure the strange guy in the parking lot wasn’t interested in stealing our unsecured bikes out of the back of the pickup truck, we decided to test out our bodies on the 2-mile loop hike. It was a pleasant-enough walk through forest, with a dramatic but mostly-hidden pit crater at the far end. If we had carved out time for it, we would have been disappointed, but as a time-filler, it did the job. And it showed that Rett was capable of moving about on her torn-up toe, though we definitely went slower on the sharp busted lava rocks than we normally would. The worst part was that our speed made it difficult to outrun the lazy mosquitos that began chasing us halfway through.

I noticed a lot of odd black balls covered in white dust on the ground, and realized they must be nuts fallen from the trees on this former plantation. I smashed one open with a lava rock, and there was definitely tasty nut meat inside, so I filled my pockets with a bunch more. But then I had a thought: can nuts be toxic? Later when we returned to service, I took a photo of them and used Google Lens to identify them as Kukui nuts, or candlenuts. And oh shit, Wikipedia says they’re mildly toxic when consumed raw! Good thing I didn’t gorge on them on the trail!

Back at the parking lot we remembered we could just sit in the truck and eat lunch rather than at the less-comfortable picnic tables scattered about. And that’s when one of the peacocks (who seem to live around the parking lot) came over and hilariously tried to get our F-150 to mate with him (or was displaying for the mirror-image of himself in the chrome bumper).

Continuing toward our AirBNB, we passed through the developmental fiasco of “Ocean View”, an absolutely enormous grid of subdivision streets misplaced on the tilted slope of Mauna Loa’s lava field. It’s four miles wide and five miles tall, with streets every quarter-mile, and maybe one or two buildings inside each of those barren 40-acre squares. It’s a project that could have made sense as something to replace farmland outside of a rapidly-growing major city, but it’s like there was a teleporter malfunction and it instead ended up here, nowhere near even a minor city, or any resources at all. Nonetheless, because the streets now exist (and have since the 1950s), people have attempted to live on them, but certainly not wealthy people looking for 40-acre estates. For our purposes there were two(!) grocery stores and a few other shops down on the main highway, and the clientele there didn’t inspire us to go off-highway to explore more.

In contrast, our “Green Sands Oasis” AirBNB was in fact an idyllic Hawaiian oasis. Several rooms are build around a shared outdoor kitchen, with pre-existing trees incorporated into the structures, and gardens surrounding them. Our private attached bathroom was one of the coolest mixes of primitive style we’ve ever seen, and soon after we arrived Rett asked if we could stay another night to continue her recuperation. Yep, we had enough food, no bookings ahead to move on to, and the ability to easily make up any “lost ground” vs. our original plans now that we had the truck.