Fleeing to a tropical paradise

Fortunately not around here !

It had stopped raining.  Hard to believe.  Of course, in Vancouver that didn't come for free:  the low temperature a few nights ago dropped to -2 degrees Celsius.   For all you climate-fortunate people living in Florida or Hawaii:  Water turns to ice at these kind of temperatures, i.e. instead of having a nice little fridge/freezer combo in a beach hut, the entire outside world turns into a giant freezer.  At 8 am there is frost on the car's windshield and paintwork.  At least there was no snow !

It feels like that ...

Then, on the day that I left, it had started raining again.  You know, the 25 2L pop bottles per square meter kind of rain.  No fun.

But I am going somewhere else now.  No, I'm not going to Germany to attend a funeral, which I would have been doing under any other circumstances, because that is just what you do when someone that close to you dies.  No, I'm flying to Hawaii.  I booked the tickets and hotel for Grandma and me weeks ago.  Yes, I briefly considered cancelling the Hawaiian holiday and attending Regine's funeral but very quickly realized that this would not make any sense.  Grandma is 96.5 years old.  This might very well be her last trip ever to that veranda by the ocean that she enjoys so much.  Gotta take care of the living first.

Grandma 15 meters from the ocean last December

Life is for the living, they say, and this time it is up to me to figure out what that entails. Not an easy or comfortable task, but someone has to do it.

On my first trip to Kona two years ago, I had sent my spare mom a postcard of the Painted Church in Captain Cook.  She LOVED it.

Inside of the painted church in Dec. 2013

So I scheduled some church attendance for this trip (not necessarily and most likely not during a regular church service) because what better place to remember someone who was there for me every time there was a need during the last 35 years than these church stairs overlooking the ocean?

Doesn't that look better suited to remember the lives of the dead than this gloomy 4:30 pm view of rainy Vancouver?