“Great! I’d get out and help, but I’d probably have to put my car in parking, and these places cost a fortune. We’ll talk tomorrow.” She waved and took off.
Marilyn and I headed over to the car, where a bellman approached us. “Checking in, sir?”
“Yes, and can we get a valet to take this off our hands?”
“Certainly, sir.” He made a hand motion and a second man came over. We got the luggage loaded on a cart, and I handed over our keys and a tip to the valet, getting a receipt in turn. The bellman led us to the front desk.
I laid my paperwork down on the registration counter.
“Aloha!” said a perky and pretty tanned Oriental girl. “Checking in?”
“Aloha to you, too. Yes, please, we are. We’re the Buckmans.” I slid my reservation notice across the counter.
Keani, that was her name according to her name tag, took the notice and went through her paperwork on her side of the counter, to pull out a set and start sorting through it. “Yes, sir, one of the Royal Hawaiian suites, the King Kamehameha Suite, very nice.”
“Great! Right now I would almost settle for a beat up No Tell Motel. Where do I sign? I have been flying since dawn!”
She laughed and slid the paperwork across to me, with several Xs where I needed to John Hancock them. “Sorry about that, but if Paradise was easy to get to, it wouldn’t be Paradise.”
Marilyn laughed and I snorted. “I hear you. Of course, this is about as close to Paradise as I’ll ever get. Saint Peter’s never going to let me through the Pearly Gates.” That got laughs all around.
King Kamehameha must have done well for himself. We had two bedrooms, a gigantic living room and dining room, and a small wet bar. I tipped the bellman, and Marilyn turned Charlie loose to look around.
“It’s gorgeous!” said Marilyn.
“It’s not bad,” I said, agreeing with her. I opened the sliding glass door up and was hit with the warm tropical breeze. I could look out at the beach and the ocean lapping slowly at the sand. “I really can’t argue with you.”
“We should have them stay with us for the weekend,” added Marilyn. “We’ve got the second bedroom. We can put the boys out here in the main room and they can have the other bedroom.” She looked over at me for confirmation.
“Sounds good to me. Let’s ask them. No reason not to,” I said, nodding.
We unpacked, and then the first thing I did was to call back to the office and leave the phone number to the suite on the answering machine, with a note that we were six hours behind them, so don’t call when they came into the office. That would be three in the morning, and I would be cranky.
I unpacked my stuff and grabbed my toilet kit and a towel (we had towel and linen service.) After a quick shower and a change of clothes, I went out into the living room and lay down on the couch. I was just going to wait for Marilyn to come back, but I woke up about two hours later. It was still light outside, although Marilyn was snoring in the bedroom. I shook myself awake and looked in on her; she had simply collapsed on the bed still in her travel clothes. Charlie was curled up next to her.
I sat down next to her and nudged her shoulder. She grumbled in her sleep and tried to roll away. I nudged her again. “Come on, sleepyhead, wake up.”
“Go away,” she grumbled.
“Come on. If you stay asleep now, you’ll be up all night. Go get cleaned up and we can go eat.”
Marilyn grumbled some more, but swung her legs off the bed and sat upright. “What’s for dinner?”
“Seafood and booze. Lots and lots of booze!” She just nodded and went into the bathroom. Charlie stayed sleeping on the bed. I looked him over and propped a couple of pillows around him to keep him from rolling off the bed in his sleep. Out in the living room I found a book showing the restaurants and services at the Royal Hawaiian. I shook my head as I looked over the list or rooms, since they all looked alike. I remembered learning during my Information Theory classes that the Hawaiian language only has twelve letters, less than half of what is in the English language. When you have a small symbol set, information density is limited, so you have large words that all look and sound alike.
We went downstairs and had dinner and about three or four drinks. We were too tired to do much more than push the stroller around the place and look at the beach. After the late local news, which is always interesting when you are in a foreign place, Marilyn and I went to bed and fell asleep, exhausted.
The next morning we were woken up by Charlie, yelling up a storm in his crib. Marilyn and I nudged each other, trying to get the other one to go to work. I won, and Marilyn grumbled and got up, throwing her robe on to retrieve our son. I climbed out of bed, too, and headed into the bathroom. I returned to find her changing his diaper. “You want more of this?” I commented. Marilyn had recently begun quizzing me about when we could make the family bigger.
She grinned at me and handed me a very young man. “Absolutely! Don’t you?!”
“That is questionable at best.”
Marilyn laughed. “Go warm up a bottle and feed him.” I was dispatched to fatherly duties while my wife went into the bathroom. I knew she would be in there the rest of the morning.
I set Charlie down for a moment and pulled on some gym shorts, and then he and I headed towards the kitchenette. I made some formula from powder and started warming it up in the microwave. I don’t mind the input; it’s the output that is the problem. Afterwards, I handed him the bottle and he fielded it like a pro. I took him and his seat outside to the patio and looked around.
Marilyn came out dressed in shorts and a tank top, with regular industrial strength underwear beneath them. This was another reminder this was a family vacation and not a ‘mommy-daddy’ vacation. She found me under the sunlight and Charlie gurgling happily and waving around his empty bottle. “Is this how you take care of your son!?” he protested.
I looked over and waved at Charlie, who waved both arms back at me. “He doesn’t seem any worse for the wear. Where could he go?”
“Daddy thinks he’s so funny!” She picked him up and carried him back inside. “You don’t even have a sunhat on!” she told him. I rolled my eyes and looked back out at the sea for a moment.
“What’s for breakfast? He might be satisfied with a bottle, but I’m not,” asked Marilyn.
“Hey, back in college, that was the breakfast of champions.”
“Well, we’re not back in college. Don’t give your son any ideas,” she answered primly.
I laughed at her. “Give me a break. He’s not even a year old yet.” I looked at him and said, “Do as I say and not as I do. When you’re old enough, I’ll tell you about what Mommy was like in college.” Almost in response, Charlie started gurgling happily and flapping his arms. “He likes that idea!”
My wife’s eyes widened at that. “You wouldn’t dare!”
I mimed toking on a joint, at which Marilyn squawked in outrage, and headed towards the bathroom. “Give me a few minutes and we’ll go out for breakfast.”
Breakfast was one of the strangest meals I’d had in a long time. Good, but strange. We ate in the main restaurant of the Royal Hawaiian, and you had the usual suspects — eggs, pancakes, bacon, and so forth — along with some tropical highlights like passion fruit/orange juice/guava juice mix. I ordered my standard eggs over easy with bacon. Then I said to Marilyn, “I’m kind of surprised they don’t have Spam on the menu.”
“What’s Spam?” she replied.
I smiled and shook my head. “All those years around the Army and you don’t know what Spam is? Are you sure you’re an American?”