Two hotels

No more family guest house. Now we're in a chain hotel called the ResortQuest, near Kapa'a. We found it on Hotwire and it's clean and pretty cheap. It even backs up to the ocean; too bad the beach is rocky.


There's a funny mural in the lobby. I should have taken a better photo so you could see that it's about two stories tall. You can tell that the message is basically, "Come to Hawaii, imperialists!"


Except for us, there are no Asian guests at all at the hotel. It pretty weird. I feel like I should be handing out towels or leis.


Tonight there's a Hawaiian Christmas luau under a big tent. I can hear the emcees and performers right now. I hope they get paid double-time for working on a holiday.


Earlier, we drove up to the North Shore where we followed my cousin Jessica's advice to eat at The Princeville. She has pretty fancy taste so we knew it would be upscale with a great view, but we decided to go for it since most of the smaller joints would be closed on Christmas. It was a little like Vegas but not as tacky.


We missed the brunch buffet, which ended at noon, and were too early for the lunch buffet, which opened at 2:00. What's up with not serving food between noon and 2:00? Instead, we ate poolside.


You know those fast-food commercials that refer to 21-dollar burgers? This is one, in the flesh. You can't see the fat slabs of bacon underneath. (Wendy didn't eat them because she's not supposed to be eating cured meat now.) I had a 19-dollar cobb salad, which was excellent, but not quite a photogenic.


The beach was pretty, but I liked the tunnel made by trees on the way to the tennis courts.


Maybe it's because I was born in the year of the monkey.


Driving around listening to Hawaiian Christmas music was fun, too, doubly reinforcing where we were and what season it was. Not a bad way to spend a holiday at all...