...Two Weeks Later Part 2: The Apartment Hunt

Roxi and I woke up at about 5:00 in the morning on Friday August 26.  Between our excitement, anxiety and not having made the adjustment to our new time zone, we couldn't sleep any longer.  We made the spontaneous decision to drive to the east end of Oahu to watch the sunrise.  We didn't quite make it in time see the actual event but we did get to enjoy a quiet morning at the Halona Blowhole.  The tide wasn't quite ideal for the water to spray up through the rocks but the views of the morning sun and island of Molokai were both breathtaking.

Sunrise at the Halona Blowhole in East Oahu

After enjoying the natural beauty of East Oahu, we headed back to the hotel for breakfast before we were set to meet Sandy to talk about our apartment hunt.  I liked our hotel but what they call a continental breakfast wouldn't even be considered a snack in most places.  They basically had sliced bread that you could toast and/or butter, banana nut muffins, some kind of breakfast cake and there was a lady making pancakes on a portable griddle.  It was included in our room price so I made sure to punish them for their meager offering but Roxi wasn't of the same mind as me.  On subsequent days she chose to forgo the breakfast altogether.

After breakfast we met with Sandy, our realtor connection, to talk about parts of town we should investigate and see some apartments that she had made appointments at for us.  She really gave us a crash course in Honolulu neighborhoods and steered us away from areas that offered much cheaper rent but ridiculously long commutes.  Oahu's dirty little secret is that the traffic is horrendous.  There are a couple of "interstate" freeways on Oahu and at many times of the day, they are more parking lots than roads.  As a result, the surface streets around the freeways are also terrible during the morning and afternoon rush hours.  Oahu is not big and commuting for work is common, but a few miles on the map translate to an hour or more in the car one way!

We settled on searching in the downtown area and adjacent neighborhoods.  Sandy had made an appointment for us in a downtown high-rise so we visited it and were actually quite pleased with what our money could get us in Honolulu.  It was not going to be an palatial apartment but it also wasn't going to be as bad as many of the tiny studios that we were expecting from our online research prior to arriving on the island. 

After our time with Sandy, we compared our notes with ads on Craigslist and in the newspaper.  Roxi and I were able to make several appointments during the afternoon and by the end of the day had found two studio apartments that were at the low and high ends of our budget that we could actually see ourselves living in for at least six months.  Housing is very competitive in Oahu and even if you have had an application accepted, there is no telling how many other qualified applicants are vying for the same space.  So we had no guarantees but were given encouragement from the leasing agents for the two apartments.  After a long day we called it night feeling a sense of progress in our Hawaiian adventure.

We woke up very early in the morning on Saturday August 27 to get ready for a faculty orientation event that Roxi needed to attend for Hawai'i Pacific University.  She will be teaching classes at the downtown campus but this orientation was being held at the Loa campus over the Ko'olau Mountains northeast of Honolulu.  The drive from Waikiki up the Pali Highway is beautiful and capped off by an amazing view of the towns of Kailua and Kaneohe from various spots along the road.

I dropped Roxi off and headed back to the hotel to do much needed laundry.  We hadn't had the opportunity to wash clothes since we had been in Lafayette more than a week before and we were running low on a few everyday items.  While I was waiting for clothes to dry, I did some more research on Craigslist and in the newspaper to find an apartment.  A few hours later, I drove back up the Pali Highway to get Roxi and we decided to take a drive down to Kailua and see what we thought of the area.  It was definitely more suburban and calmer than Honolulu, but the beaches were very crowded for the weekend and we felt like this would probably be too far out of the way for a commute to the city.  On our way back to Honolulu, we had time to stop at a food truck for some delicious garlic shrimp!

View from the Pali Highway

View from the Pali Highway

After a few hours rest back at the hotel and still more research on apartments, we played tourists and had a sunset dinner at the Hula Grill along the beach at Waikiki.  After dinner we went for a walk along the beach and tried to remind ourselves that despite all the stress and hard work we were doing, we were getting ourselves set up to live in paradise.

We slept in a little on the morning of Sunday August 28, but were still up and out of the hotel rather early.  Roxi was busy at work preparing syllabi for her upcoming classes but we took some time out to visit another potential apartment on the west side of Oahu.  It was another strong contender.  On our way back to the hotel, we paid a visit to Chinatown.  Based on our realtor friend Sandy's recommendations, we took some time walking through the markets and getting some very fresh fruits and vegetables.  We also marveled at the multitudes of fresh meats and fish that were available as well.  Roxi made a few mental notes about potential gumbo ingredients. 

We decided to have a dim sum lunch at Mei Sum and it was fantastic.  Not only was the food outstanding, it was the best value for our money at any restaurant since arriving on Oahu.  I have a feeling that we will be eating in Chinatown quite a bit!  After lunch we did a little more exploring of the area before heading back to the hotel.  Roxi continued working on her class preparations while I returned to the grocery store to get a few more things we had run out of.  Roxi spent the rest of the evening working on her classes while I completed several apartment applications and emailed them on to the leasing agents and/or owners.

Monday August 29 was more of the same.  Roxi was working on her class preparation and I was making contacts with apartment leasing agents.  We left the hotel at around noon to head to an appointment to see a place not too far from downtown.  We drove by before our appointment and thought it looked promising.  It was cluster of bungalows as opposed to the larger apartment buildings that we had been looking at.  We met with the agent about thirty minutes later and were pretty amazed at what he showed us.  It seemed like a pretty great deal although it was at the upper end of our price range.  We talked with him about ourselves and he urged us to fill out an application on the spot.

After Roxi and I left, we were discussing the possibility of the apartment we had just seen and decided to start thinking about furnishing whatever we ended up getting.  We were looking at mattresses when I received a phone call from the agent that we had met with only thirty minutes earlier.  He had spoken to the owner and she had given him the okay to rent us the apartment.  I was so shocked at how quickly he got back to us that I was lost for words.  I told him I had to talk it over with Roxi and that I would call him back in a few minutes.  Roxi and I went to a Starbucks to discuss the pros and cons of the apartment.  Besides being a little bit more that I wanted to spend on rent, there weren't really any other cons.  I called the agent back and we made arrangements to review and sign the lease later that afternoon.

After Roxi took care of some paperwork at the HPU downtown campus, we went to the leasing agent's office, reviewed and signed the lease, paid our deposit and first months rent and were given the keys to our new place in Hawaii!  It is located about a mile north of the heart of downtown Honolulu where both Roxi and I will be working yet it doesn't feel like we are living downtown.  It is in an area called the Lower Punchbowl named for the proximity to the extinct volcano crater that is a few hundred yards from us that is now the site of the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific.  It was such a relief to find an apartment and be done with that stage of the process and it only took us five days!  The next step was to furnish the place but that work would start in earnest on Tuesday.

Lower Punchbowl: Our new neighborhood in Honolulu

...Two Weeks Later Part 1: Los Angeles to Honolulu

I had planned to be much better about updating my blog during this transition, but in our defence, we had a lot going on and limited internet access until late last week.  So without further ado, here's a part one of what we've been up to since my last post:

After a week of driving from Memphis to Hermosa Beach, CA we had our first multi-night stay in the same place since we left Lafayette on August 20.  I woke up pretty early on Wednesday August 24 and set out to get our car ready for dropping of at the shipper later that afternoon.  This mainly involved me getting all our personal belongings out of the car and giving it a thorough wash.  Although the Autozone and carwash in Hermosa Beach were only a couple of miles away, the whole process of washing the car took about two hours because of the ridiculous amounts of traffic.  Little did I know that this would just be the beginning of my experiences with gridlock.

After washing the car and having some lunch, Roxi and I borrowed my brother Garrett's car so that we could caravan to the port in Long Beach to drop of our car.  The process wasn't terribly complicated so much as it was a lot of sitting around and waiting our turn.  Apparently, Wednesdays are the last day to get cars on the next outgoing ship so they are the busiest day of the week at the port.  Had we known this, we might have planned our travel accordingly, but there we were.  In reality, it wasn't so bad but we did have to wait about an hour before they processed and inspected our car. 

With that finished, we headed back to Hermosa Beach.  We spent the rest of the afternoon and much of the evening relaxing.  Rather than cook dinner again, we went out to eat with Garrett and Nicole and tried to fathom what we were about to do.  It still seemed so unbelievable!

On Thursday August 26, I woke up early as usual and set myself to getting us ready to make it to the airport on time for our flight.  Roxi and I did I final luggage check, loaded up Garrett's car and said goodbye to Nicole as she left for work.  Garrett dropped us off at LAX on his way to work and now it was really setting in: we were about to travel to Hawaii on a one-way ticket!

Check-in went pretty well although we found out that we had oversold tickets.  It really seems like that is information that you as a consumer should be privy to when you purchase a plane ticket.  I certainly would have considered a different flight if I had been given notice that this was an oversold flight.  But since I had been in this position before, I wasn't worried yet.  My biggest concern at the moment was getting through security and to our gate.

Security proved to be a much bigger deal than check-in.  We had so much stuff packed tightly into our bags, I guess we both seemed suspicious.  Roxi and I both had no trouble going through the body scanners but our carry on bags were completely unpacked and checked through by screeners.  When they were done going through our things, we were left to repack our bags as best as we could in the middle of the airport.  Again, it wasn't so bad but it was still security theater as far as I'm concerned. 

We got some breakfast and checked-in at the gate and we were still on the oversold list.  This made Roxi a little worried but since I'd had this happen before and made it on a flight, I was still okay.  Sure enough, ten minutes later when I checked with the gate agents again, they had our boarding passes.  Not long after, we boarded our flight and there was no turning back now...we were island bound!

The flight from LAX to Honolulu was only five hours and we slept for much of the time.  Before leaving Garrett and Nicole's I had downloaded a few movie rentals from iTunes so we watched one of them when we couldn't sleep anymore.  By the time the movie was over, we were in range of the islands and Roxi took a couple of good pictures of the Big Island and Maui before we had to put our electronic devices away in preparation for landing on Oahu.

The Big Island

The Big Island (left) and Maui (right)

After we landed and got our bags, we had a long wait to get our rental car but eventually we made it out of the airport area and began our adventure on Oahu.  We had so much to do it was a little overwhelming but we were both hungry and we happened to find a great fish taco restaurant called Wahoo's and had a delicious lunch that was so large, it would end up being our dinner as well.

After lunch we decided the best thing to do was to check into our hotel so that we could feel grounded before we tried to tackle our next orders of business like finding an apartment.  We had found a good rate at the Aqua Aloha Surf & Spa in Waikiki and it turned out to be on the same street as the hotel we stayed in on our honeymoon!  Needless to say, we were familiar with the area which was a plus since there was so much that was still unfamiliar to us about the island.  Twenty-eight days after deciding to make the move to Hawaii, we were here and pretty proud of ourselves for accomplishing so much in such a short time.

Thanks to our friend Jay Mac Sanders in Houston, we had a connection with a Realtor in Honolulu who was going to help us figure out where we should try to find a place to live.  We talked to Sandy shortly after checking into our hotel on Thursday afternoon and scheduled a time to meet on Friday morning to start looking at rentals.  Feeling like we had accomplished a fair amount of business, Roxi and I rewarded ourselves with a trip to the beach.  We dug through our luggage to find our swimsuits and headed for Waikiki Beach.  After the very short walk we got in the beautiful blue water that was the perfect temperature for the heat of the afternoon and had a relaxing swim.  We still couldn't get over the fact that we were in Hawaii!

After the swim we went back to hotel before venturing out to the nearest grocery store to stock up on supplies.  We had to constantly remind ourselves that although we were in paradise, this is not a vacation but rather a change of venue for our lives.  We had booked the room we did so that we would be able to make dinner and lunch and save our money for living expenses for the next year or more.  We drove to a nearby Safeway which seems to be the chain grocer on the island.  I knew that groceries would be more expensive in Hawaii but I was shocked by some of the prices.  Even more surprising was the amount of savings that we could get if we had a club card.  After getting our essentials for our first week in the hotel, I took a chance of asking about a club card at the service desk.  Since I couldn't prove I had moved to Hawaii, I wasn't sure that I would get a card, but they gave me one and told me to enter my address online when we were settled in an apartment.  Score!

We took our groceries back to the hotel had some dinner and settled in for bed.  It had, after all, been a very long day considering that we added three hours with the time change.  We were exhausted and knew that we had several more long but exciting days ahead of us.

Day 9: LAX to HNL: 2,556 miles