Delayed Hawaiian Honeymoon: Part 6

Our last full day on Maui started off with a helicopter ride.  After driving through the airport several times and circling around some detoured backroads, we stopped off at a Marriott hotel to ask for directions to the helipad because there were no signs anywhere for it and neither of our GPSes were finding it.  The woman at the counter told me, Yeah that's hard to find.  Then she gave me great directions, which included, You'll see a bunch of random cars along the way in the middle of nowhere.  I love directions like that because just when you think you're lost, bam boom there it is.  And that's pretty much what happened.  We found the helipad and Blue Hawaiian Helicopter Tours and got weighed again--they'd asked us when we booked it how much we weighed but then we got weighed again, probably because people lie.

We watched a video about safety and buckling in the seatbelt was confusing enough let alone attaching a flotation belt.  Luckily, when we walked out to the helicopter, the entire staff swarmed us and the pilot practically put my headphones on for me.  I sat next to Pilot Mike and Eddie sat next to me.  Four others piled into the back and we were off.  The music for takeoff was that Highway to the Danger Zone song from Top Gun.  I shit you not.  This was awesome.

The flight was 45 minutes along West Maui and across to Molokai.  It defined breath-taking.  Along the way, Pilot Mike asked me about the shape of an island.  I said it looked like a turtle, and he said I was close--they call it an elephant.  Pilot Mike is a nice guy because a turtle is not close to an elephant.  He also asked Eddie where we were staying in Maui, and Eddie strung together some Hawaiian sounding words, and Pilot Mike took that as an actual answer.

We both took maybe 200 pictures each, and a lot of them look exactly the same, but we will probably never be in a helicopter again and we probably will never be in Maui again, so we captured as much of it as we could.  Plus, we bought the DVD of the tour.  I told Eddie that if he wanted to buy it, we would have to watch it every May as a Hawaii anniversary.  He agreed.  We'll see how long that lasts.

This is not a turtle.

All week we'd wondered about this.  The local high school decorates it.

Sugar mill smokestacks

 Upon our return to the hotel, I found a flower and put it in my hair as we were told to do at the luau the previous night, and then I had some Maui potato chips because, as we've already seen, Hawaii is for eating.

We lounged around for a bit and then started to get ready to head out.  To a sports bar.  To watch the Ranger game.  Does this sound familiar to anyone?  I went to throw some stuff in my tote bag, the one I'd gotten at the first morning's breakfast, the one I'd been using to throw stuff in like the beer can and the water bottle and the Christmas ornament and the tea, the one that had a pretty Hawaiian lady on it.  The bag wasn't where I'd left it, next to my other luggage, nowhere near the garbage (foreshadowing!).  I called out to Eddie, My bag is gone!  He helped me look for it.  It was totally gone.  I called the front desk and they put me through to housekeeping, and housekeeping said they'd check with the woman who cleaned my room and would get back to me.

And here's where things get very un-honeymoon-like and very throw-down-Eddie's-Brooklyn-has-rubbed-off-on-me-ish.

A few minutes later, that particular housekeeper came back to my room and handed me the bag that was now folded up and empty.  I asked where my items were, and she responded that the bag had been filled with garbage, so she’d thrown it all out.  I told her she needed to find my items, and she said she wasn’t sure that she could.

Basically, she'd thrown out all my stuff.

Eddie and I went down to the front desk where I asked to see a manager.  The people at the counter told me that the manager was with someone, but I could wait.  After fifteen minutes of silent fuming and almost-crying, I checked back at the desk, and they told me that they did not know where the manager was or when he would be back.  What the!?  I told them that I needed to speak to someone because items were taken and thrown out from my room. 

The housekeeping supervisor came into the lobby, and she pulled me aside to ask me what was taken and to take a picture of the now empty bag.  I was so angry by this point, I heard myself getting Brooklyn-nasty, and my yoga-calm was suffering, so I started crying as I was talking.  This is not what I'd planned to do on my honeymoon.

I told her I wasn’t sure of what exactly was in the bag because I’d kept throwing all my souvenirs and trinkets into it without thought.  She said she’d need receipts from me, and there was nothing else she could do if I didn’t have receipts.  I explained that some of the receipts were in the bag with the items, and that I did not want to spend my last afternoon in Maui going over my receipts to figure out what was taken.  She reiterated that there was nothing she could do without receipts, which also completely ignores the sentimental items I’d collected along the way.   

Eddie was now fuming and tried explaining, but she was not listening to his explanation, so we went back up to the room and found the one receipt we had for the Christmas ornament.  When we left the room, she appeared through a magical housekeeping door, so I handed it to her and said we’d take care of the rest when we returned later on.

When we came back to the lobby, I asked the people at the front desk if I could leave my cell phone number to speak to the manager when he returned.  They said that the manager in charge of rooms was available to speak to me.  I don’t know why they hadn’t called her in the first place.

She was the first person to actually apologize and listen to our problem.  She was perplexed as to why it had happened, and she was adamant that she could make it right.  She said that she would go out and buy any items I could think of to replace them; the only items I knew for sure that were in the bag were the Christmas ornament and some tea I’d purchased at the Whaler’s Village.  She spent a few minutes talking to us, sympathizing and apologizing, and she was the most professional person with whom we interacted.

We left it at that and took the Beach Walk to the sports bar.  On the way, we made some little lizard friends.

We arrived at Pailolo Grill where I immediately ordered a margarita.

Cure all

These are the snacks that everyone at the bar got but us.

We ordered lunch.  We watched the game.  We found a girl who was from New York and rooting for the Rangers. We sat for the whole game, so Eddie ordered a second round of chicken fingers from the kids' menu.  And I?  Well, after a delicious salad washed down with a margarita, I ordered churros that came with salted chocolate dipping sauce, and I ate the entire plate.  Because Hawaii is for eating.  And because churros also made me feel better after housekeeping threw out my stuff.

After the game, we took the Beach Walk back to the hotel.  Even with the aggravation, the day was gorgeous.