An Outdoor Shower with a Gecko

The Great Plotnik took an outdoor shower this morning, surrounded by lava rock on three sides and a view of crashing Pacific waves on the fourth. A small, green gecko ran up the lava rock when the water went on. The Costco shampoo and conditioner bottles were full and the soap dispenser actually had soap in it. The waves are blue and the sand white today, after yesterday's arrival when the waves and sand and street and highway and sky were black with thunderous tropical rain.

The little street that leads into Santa's B&B was so flooded, Plotnik couldn't get out of the car to try hitting the button to the automatic gate, which, at any rate, was busted. After much shouting, Gary, the owner of the B&B came out, opened the gate, and Chapter One, which had begun on an ATA flight from SF














and continued into the cheesiest rental Chevy on the island of Oahu, was over.

Chapter Two is working out well -- a Thai dinner last night in the town of Haleiwa (fanTAStic green curry with eggplant, shrimp and calamari, Tom Kha Gai), waves that sound like the 680 freeway crashing outside the window all night long (and right now), Snack Packs and muffins stocked in the fridge for breakfast, coffee trekked in from SF to be drunk while walking on the still-wet beach this morning and talking to a suntanned, balding fisherman with hips. Kind of like Plotnik, without the fisherman part and the tan.

The Great Plotnik used to be tanned. As a boy, The Soon-to-Be Great Plotnik would mahoganize himself just by walking outside. With Greatness has come looking like a jellyfish.


The sand here is like Molokai, the stuff Plotnik calls Potential Sand. It's still coarse with lots of white shells in it, maybe because of all the rain they've had, or maybe because it still needs a few more tens of thousands of years to break down into the soft, fluffy stuff. A pretty woman in a tiny bathing suit runs by, down by the water, doing grapevines in the sand.

'Those are hard to do,' says Ducknik.

'Nice keester,' thinks Plotnik.

Small houses lie maybe fifteen feet above sea level, behind a layer of palm trees and sea grape, no more than twenty feet from high tide. It'd be a lovely way to live, until the next typhoon. None of these palms look very old.

Santa's B&B is stacked full of kitschy Santa-stuff, every imaginable tchotcke from around the world that has a Santa on it. Uh, no.

But it's big and homey and squeaky clean (even passed the Ducknik Test) and the owner is cool and the Plotniks will be sorry to leave, in maybe two hours, to drive around the island the other way, take a picture for AOL of a beach and review a restaurant, then arrive back in Waikiki on time for the UCLA game this afternoon.

Chapter Three starts tonight at the Moana Surfrider Hotel -- Ducknik gives her speech in the morning at the Conference and The Great Plotnik wanders off, ukelele on back, looking for restaurants to review, cheap Hawaiian shirts and many chocolate covered macadamia nuts.