Our goal for the day was to go snorkeling, and the guide book said that the best place for it was Kealakekua Bay, so we drove down to the bay just by following the map on my phone and trusting that when we got there, we'd find someone renting snorkle gear. The drive was long and very winding down a big hill, and it was surprisingly remote and residential. We expected to find someplace to eat breakfast on the way, and the only place was a little shop that sold coffee and macadamia nuts. We sampled some coffees, and bought some Kona coffee beans, cups of coffee, chocolate-covered macadamia nuts (for later) and two small homemade muffins. It was a pretty stingy breakfast. When we got down to the bay, we found a parking lot... and not much else. The only person renting snorkle gear was a toothless woman who approached our car - she didn't have a store. Pretty sketchy.
We drove all the way back up to the main road and found a legitimate snorkle-renting establishment. The guy told us that the people down in the parking lot were renting gear illegally, and we found out that if we had taken her up on her offer, we could have gotten in trouble. See, we would have had to rent a kayak to get out into the bay, and she didn't tell us that if we want to park the kayak on the beach, we'd need a permit. Otherwise we'd have to tow the kayak as we snorkled. Since kayak rental wasn't cheap, and towing the kayak as we snorkled sounded really lame, we asked the rental guy where else we could go, and he recommended Two Step, a bay about 20 minutes south with a volcanic shelf extending out into the water. The name comes from an area of the lava shelf where there are natural steps that make an easy launching point into the water, so we wouldn't need to rent a kayak.
So we drove down there, stopping along the way at a cute little diner perched on the hill, and their dining area was an outdoor patio with a great view of the ocean. There were geckos crawling around on the banisters and sipping from the little jelly cups that customers had left out for them. Super cute!
After a very tasty breakfast, we went down to Two Step, which is right next to the Place of Refuge. We snorkled around and had a lot of fun, there were so many fish! The water was ridiculously clear and there was lots of coral. The water was pleasantly warm too, quite a change from the snorkling we did in Southern California, where we needed wetsuits. It was awesome.
After a while, we decided to try another location, so we got some lunch and drove about an hour north to another spot that the guide book recommended. We had to drive down this long, unmaintained dirt road that was heavily potholed and rough and rocky since it went right over lava rock - it was pretty harrowing and I think we didn't have any business on that road, it should have been restricted to 4WD vehicles only! Anyway, we drove down to this state park where the snorkling was apparently fabulous. We don't know. We never snorkled there, because when we went to get our snorkle gear out of the trunk... it wasn't there. I'd left it on a picnic table at Two Step. I, of course, proceed to freak out and cry, bawling about ruining our day and how expensive it would be to replace all that gear. So we drove back to Two Step.. and everything was still on the table, hours later! Yay friendly, honest snorkling folk.
We decided not drive aaaall the way back to that state park, which was an enormous waste of time, and just snorkle at Two Step again. As we were walking out to the launch point, I realized my wedding ring (we'd locked my engament ring in our safe at home) was feeling loose, so we locked it in the car. I thought about suggesting to James that he lock up his ring too, but then.. didn't.
We got in the water and snorkled around for about 10 or 15 minutes when James popped up out of the water and said "I lost my ring!" My heart stopped. I couldn't even understand him at first. His wedding ring?? Lost?!? It slipped off his finger and he followed it down to the coral, where he saw it land on a sea urchin, but the urchin's needles kept him from getting the ring back. He asked me for a bobby pin, but I didn't have one in my hair. So he swam back to shore to get one from the car, while I treaded water and kept my eye on this one piece of coral, to keep our spot over the place where he lost the ring. It was about 100 feet (or more) from shore, and the ring had fallen, luckily, on to a rocky ledge about 10 feet deep. If it had fallen anywhere else, it could have landed in 30 feet of water, where we'd never see it from the surface and could never get down to retrieve it, or in a sandy patch where sand could have covered it up, or into a deep crevice in a rock.
James swam back to me and tried to find the ring again (he found a bobby pin on the rocks as he was climbing out of the water!), but the sun was going down and it was overcast so the lighting was terrible. We swam around for a long time looking for it, but couldn't find it again. We went back to shore, and somewhere along the way I started crying. I'd been holding it together pretty well until then, I was remarkably calm while we were looking for it, but when we decided to give up, that killed me. We had a flight to Kauai at 7am the next day, so this was our only chance to get the ring back. We sat in the car for a bit in a state of shock, then James decided to go back in before the sun set, to look one last time. He was the only person in the water at that point. I stood on the rocky shore and watched him, fretting. I was so worried he'd get into trouble out there all alone. Eventually I called him back because I was getting so worried he'd drown.
We drove into town for dinner, at the Kona Brewing Company, and cried into our beers (and pizza). It was devastating to lose the ring. At first we thought, oh it'll cost about $400 to replace, it stinks but it's not too bad, we'll get a new ring engraved with "My hope is constant in thee" and it'll be okay. But the cost was nothing. The sentimental value of the ring was enormous. We'd just assumed we'd have our wedding rings forever. And getting a replacement, we'd always know that the new ring was not the ring. It would always be the not real wedding ring. The ring I gave to him on our wedding day would always be lost at the bottom of that bay. We were wrecks.
We went back to our hotel and went to bed, but we both woke up around midnight and were wide awake. James paced the room and I looked up the fee for changing our flights online, but I couldn't find anything. We debated whether it would be worth potentially the cost of the ring to change our flights, to stay in Kona and search for the ring again. It seemed like it was really unlikely that we'd find it, and that would just be money down the toilet. We were so anxious and distressed and miserable at the thought of leaving the ring.
Eventually we fell back asleep, and got up early to go to the airport. We checked out of the hotel and were all packed and ready to fly to Kauai, but first James decided to talk to a Hawaiian Airlines person about how much it would cost to move our flight out to the evening. It was less than $200, so we went for it.
It was about 5:30 am and we were dead tired, so I suggested we sneak back into our hotel room. We'd dropped our keys in the express checkout box, because we'd left before the front desk was staffed, so I figured they probably hadn't actually checked us out yet. When we got back to the hotel, we asked for a new key to our room, and they gave it to us! Yippee! I guess they hadn't processed the keys in the drop box yet. We went back to our room and immediately fell asleep for a few hours.
We drove down to the place where we'd rented snorkle gear the day before, but they weren't open, so we went across the street to a European snorkle shop. I didn't understand what was European about it until we went in, and the woman at the counter only spoke French. We asked to rent some gear - snorkles and masks, fins, a shorty wet suit for me because I'd gotten some bad burns on my back and upper thighs the day before, and waterproof flashlights. We explained we needed the flashlights to try to find James' wedding ring. It took a lot of pantomiming and explaining to get her to understand what happened, and when she got it, she called out to her partner in the back. The man came out and she explained what happened to him. We explained and pantomimed some more. He said he'd get his scuba gear and go down and help us search - we were shocked! We asked him how much that would cost, and he said he'd do it for free. It was amazing. We were kind of speechless but happily agreed. They loaded us up with gear, then the man got in his truck and took off for the Place of Refuge. We had a hell of a time following him down - we were afraid he might not go to the right place, so we didn't want to lose him, but he flew down those winding crazy roads like a bat out of hell. It was nuts.
When we got to Two Step, he leapt out of his truck and started putting on his gear and getting into the water, so James told me I had to park our car, he had to follow the French man! So James jumped out of the car and ran off after Frenchie, and I carefully picked my way down this narrow road with all these cars parked on one side, nervous that I'd bang up the rental car that I wasn't even supposed to drive. Eventually I found parking, and on the walk back to Two Step, I thought "they're going to find the ring before I even get in the water!"
I got my wetsuit on and was sitting on the steps, jamming my fins on my feet when James swam up to me. I asked him how it was going, and he proudly showed me his wedding band, back on his finger!
James and Frenchie had swam out to the spot (the fact that James had swam back and forth to the shore twice the night before had given him a really good idea of where the ring was, the angle he needed to swim from the step and how far out to go), and after a few minutes of orienting himself, James spotted the ring. He pointed it out to Frenchie, who plucked it out of the urchin with his bare hands.
So that was that. We thanked Frenchie profusely, and he took off in his truck again. We got breakfast at the same diner as the day before, just marvelling at having the ring back. We couldn't believe it!
We went back to the Place of Refuge to snorkle again. James wanted to show me the urchin that held his ring all night (we joked that I'd been married to an urchin for one night), and he wanted to take a picture of it. But by then the sky was all clouded over (when James found the ring that morning, it was during the one hour of sunshine for the whole day) and the water was cold, I was having trouble with my snorkle, and James couldn't find the urchin again, so we decided to call it quits. But I did get a picture of Two Step, and the place in the water that was almost the final resting place of James' wedding ring.
See that guy who's bending over, in the checked blue shorts? The ring was lost in the area just to the left of his head. I think.
We returned our gear, thanking the French man and woman again, and we even got pictures with them, haha.
We drove about halfway to the airport, to a Border's bookstore that I'd seen driving around the day before. I knew that big chain bookstores are good places to use bathrooms so we went there to change out of our wet bathingsuits. We hung out there for a while, I read a guidebook for Kauai and James worked on his computer, killing time until our 7pm flight. Eventually we decided it was time to get some food before our flight, so we went to a strip mall nearby and a nice little cheap BBQ place. It was called the Meat Shack or something. It was surprisingly tasty - I got chicken with a spicy Thai peanut sauce and brown rice. James got plain chicken and brown rice, so I shared by peanut sauce with him.
We repacked our luggage in the parking lot after we ate - things were kind of crazy. Then we drove up to the airport and waited around for a long time for our flight. Then we flew to Kauai!!!
Well, first we flew to Honolulu, where we didn't listen to the announcements after landing, disembarked, then realized that our plane to Kauai was the same one we took from Hawaii, so we could have just stayed on the plane, which is what the announcements had said, if we had listened. Oh well!
After we landed in Kauai, we got our rental car and drove to our hotel, which was thankfully only 15 or 20 minutes from the airport. We checked in and went to bed. It had been a crazy and exhausting couple of days!
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