Return to Sender

Waking up in that Honolulu hostel on June 29th, I felt ready for my return home. It had been a fabulous adventure being abroad for the past few months but it was time for that chapter of my life to close. I hopped out of bed and got ready. There was still one more thing to do. I was going to hike the Diamond Head Crater.

I dropped my luggage off at the hostel office, called an Uber and rode to the crater. My driver apparently is known in Honolulu for providing candy and waters for her passengers. There is one other fun driver in Honolulu according to her who does karaoke with his passengers in his van. My driver also had a stuffed animal lion head in the front seat but I learned that it was just a backpack. She doesn’t dress up as a lion.

Because I had made my reservation for the crater unlike last time, I was let in and began the trek up. The activity wasn’t really a hike, more of a walk and a quick one at that.

The crater was steep but as I galloped up, I could feel how much more in shape I had become over the past months. I was zipping past everyone. Near the top, I had to walk through a long tunnel to then arrive at the top of the crater. I finally saw the classic Honolulu city scene.

It was a very picturesque walk and I’m glad I made the effort to go up here, especially given that it was the day I was flying home. I walked back down to the entrance and ordered another Uber back to my hostel. My driver had a nice minivan and she kind of gave the vibe that she was a friend’s mom picking me up after school. We talked about how her niece was also studying abroad and how she might have been using the Arcadia Abroad program as well.

Back in Waikiki, I had some time to use before my flight. I returned to the Poke Bowl place and ordered another bowl for breakfast/lunch. I then walked to the mall and picked up my suitcase I had stored there when I first got to Oahu. I pulled it back to my hostel, picked up my other luggage and called my final Uber to take me to the airport.

This Uber driver was a lifelong resident of Hawaii. He ranked the islands for me (Big Island is at the bottom, Kauai is the top), discussed airlines, told me about his experience growing up here and how he wanted to get off “the rock”. He left Hawaii to for a job on the west coast of the mainland and then found it too cold and went home. He tries to learn the greetings used in various languages so when I told him how I had studied in New Zealand, he responded with “Kia Ora!” He told me every university student from Hawaii that he drives always has a marine biology major or something similar to that. He apparently asked one student if they would all be competing for the same jobs after university and the student responded that “the ocean is vast”.

At the airport, I told the driver to drop me off in the JetBlue area since that was the airline I was flying with but he said he had never heard of it. He just dropped me off at the departures and I tried to find it. Turns out, I booked it through JetBlue but it was actually a Hawaiian Airline flight. All that meant was if you were at that airport at that moment, you might have seen a guy pushing a huge suitcase, three backpacks and a boxed pineapple in a cart down the long road to the correct terminal.

A couple hours later, I was squished into the middle of the middle row of a plane destined for Boston. It was 2:00pm my time when I got on the plane but in Massachusetts it was 8:00pm. I wasn’t very tired but I tried to sleep some of the time. During the other time, I watched The Middle and Friends. I arrived in Boston at 6:00am Boston time but it felt like midnight to me.

Five months and two days after leaving home for an adventure of a lifetime, I was back.

Now that I’m right side up again, this blog is coming to a close. Tune in next time for the final post.