Well, early day on the royal – off the boat at 9am – Uber to hotel, 10 minutes away, checked in but no room until 4 (fortunately, ready at two).
Choices of reclines were:
Or the meat-locker cold Business center.
We vent for privacy.
First order of business was to track down a “transist wheelchair” for sale. Found, bought, Ubered back.
Lovely views from the Two-Bedroom Presidential at the Wyndham Waikiki Beach Walk. Three balconies spread between two floors!
And then off to Tommy Bahama!
Tommy Bahama is my second home during happy hour on Waikiki!
Sadly, just two more nights and back stateside.
When we wee still on the boat, I swapped our Alaska Premium tickets (extra leg room, free drinks) for one of the few lay-flat beds back to the states…Hawaiian Airlines A330 Business Class seats.
And now that we have our own wheelchair, makes it MUCH easier go get around – and a pretty sticker:
Johnathan got us into a lounge (since I couldn’t since we’d switch airlines)…
And now onto the areoplane!
And a GREAT movie about a family run bathhouse….
What a lovely way to end my final trip!
[156.5]
For the final blog post, click here.
Dearest Mark,
Sending you love and blessings for your next adventure. The closing song of many a LRY worship service keeps chanting in my brain…May the longtime sun shine upon you. All love surround you. And the pure light within you, guide you all the way Home. ❤️
Funny thing, Markie: I never thought of you as a hedonist. You were just someone who loved the taste of life, and the pleasure of joy, and the authenticity of ‘quality’ in your surroundings. You showed me “It’s possible to live in boring spaces with hum-drum, uninteresting furnishings — but WHY??”
Today I glaze my walls with deep plum and glowing terra cotta; I stay up all night in my front yard prepping for a 2’x3’solar-activated print of a cedar branch in vivid orange that begins to emerge on my fabric when the brass-gold sun of a summer morning ignites my dew-wet fabric, now forever redolent of abrasive dawn breezes freighted with the smoke of forests that blazed all night — like I did, waiting. I call it “Wild Fires” and I love it. Without you in my life, it would have slogged along as survival. Instead it’s become an unrepeatable alchemical compound laced with vaudeville coelesced around a Heart hungry for FIRE.
You lit that in me, Markie, when I watched you making curtains. When you visibly purred over some outrageous find acquired thru the ‘Tradin’ Times,’ picked over like the cooling remains of a Rock-Cornish Game Hen. It would later be like you, Markie, to perhaps pop such a hen or three into your oven before sallying forth in your dad’s brown station wagon, your brain abuzz with the intoxicating aroma of DEAL. Many’s the time you returned with an objec both arcane and repairable; I’ve always caressed the memory of an ancient pinball machine with me wedged in longwise beside it,giddy and grinning. Having a role in your exuberant, well-upholstered, and often borderline-illegal brain children made my life more savored and savory, more brazen, and more hilarious; more rich like whipped cream (when I order a latte, I say simply “enough to go up my nose when I drink it” — the baristas usually grin, and my order is never wrong), luxurious as the feel of velvet on all my bare skin (my favorite thing at your Capitol Hill house was the “Clothing Optional” sign just inside the front door), and as warm and vital as the heart that is breaking inside me at having to say goodbye to you from this dismal, deluded plane of existance.
You found the exquisite in it, Markie. And whe it’s my turn to rise, glowing and beautiful and whole again, I’m going to be looking for the ETERNAL BLAZING COMBUSTION of your exquisite Heart among those who greet me. I’d know it anywhere.
Hasta la vista y viya con Dios, my dearest, longest, most enduring friend-family of 51 Earth-years. See you on the other side.
(Only next time, I’m not riding next to the damned pinball machine. And no sneezing into my hand, you hear me? I mean it…)
With such Love, and So Many Tears… I am gonna miss you for the rest of my life, Markie. Now, if I can just stop typing and let you go……..