Heading home

Things I will miss:

• The warmth. That would be both the weather and the aloha spirit there is here.
• Living in sun dresses and bikinis. Much as I love the fashion of the rest of the year, minimal clothing feels very liberating.
• This beautiful house, the best rental we've ever had. Much as we enjoyed the house we rented here last time, this one is just better in so many ways. It's not quite as close to the beach, but it's still close, and it's closer to town. It's wonderfully comfortable. It felt like home right away! And there's room for guests. :)
• Sharing the house with geckos. I hate bugs in a house. Hated roaches back in the day, hate ants. Love spiders, but they don't belong indoors. But for some reason, it seems quite appropriate to have tiny geckos running up the walls. They don't bother anything, and they're cute. Had a little magic this morning—two of them as I sat here typing.
• The beach. We have nice beaches in and near where we live, both salt water and fresh water, but here I can go into the water without steeling myself against the cold. And lying on the sand in the hot sun is just better here, even though I have to be more careful about getting burned. And let's not forget warm-water surfing!
• The stars. Not every night was clear, but the last few have been wonderful. Even with some light from nearby houses, we could see an amazing number of stars. The light pollution at home is horrible, and much of it unnecessary.
• The local food. I would miss things like salmon and fresh summer berries from home, but I do love the local fish here, especially ahi (yellowfin) tuna and fruits like apple bananas and papayas and pineapples that are actually ripe.
• Coffee from the island. I love the coffee I get at home, but it would be pretty cool to be able to do a 100-mile diet that included coffee!

Things I won't miss:

• The humidity. You're never totally dry. I gave up on trying to dry my hair. I just let it dry on its own. And wearing makeup other than mascara is pretty much an exercise in futility.
• The soft water. It's nice to my skin and my hair, but rinsing it off is very difficult. We also have much better tasting tap water.
• The roosters. Kauai is famous for its feral chickens, which escaped some time in the past. Many of them are lovely ornamentals, but the bloody roosters crow just about any time they feel like it. It seems to have nothing to do with dawn.
• Bug bites. Usually bugs don't find me appetizing for some reason, but I have some bites on my toes I could do without.

The "won't miss" list is pretty small, eh? I imagine if I thought hard enough, I could come up with some more. Maybe the fine sand that sticks to you and is hard to get off. Pretty minor though. One thing that's not minor is that this is the United States. It doesn't feel like the Lower 48, but it's still the US. There are many reasons we chose to migrate to Canada, health care among them.

And we have to get back to our kitteh! We'd be watching television (oh, right, we'll miss the Food Network) with one lamp on. Sweetie would move a bit, and my eye would think a shadow was our kitteh. It happened several times. And of course I kept thinking she'd hop up on the bed at any moment.

Lots of people move here, settle in, and love it. As our snorkel guide said yesterday, periodically you take a trip to the mainland for a dose of things you can't get here, like some big concert. And then you're happy to come back. We'll probably just continue to visit as often as we are able, and maybe start to stretch it to two weeks instead of just one. And continue to appreciate what we have at home as well as what we have here.