Awards, Canoe Races and Another Dime Story: July 29 - August 4, 2024

 

    I'll start this week's blog with the news of some awards that the Polynesian Cultural Center received at the end of July.

    The first was by USA Today, Readers' Choice, #1 Best Family Attraction in Hawaii" for 2024.  This award will help attract tourist to make the PCC a destination to see while visiting Oahu, which in turn keeps more BYU-Hawaii students working to help pay for their education.  

     The second award was given by Tripadvisor, the "Travelers' Choice Award 2024".  It too will help attract more guests to visit the PCC while vacationing here.  Most of the students at BYU-H (80%) would not be able to attend school without the support that working at the PCC provides.

     On Monday as I was going through the kitchen to lunch, which I do every day, I walked right past this pig.  It's the first time I have seen the pig before it was roasted.  They come to the food warehouse in the boxes the pig is laying on, so I never see the actual pig.  It's not a sight I want to remember as I enjoy the pork at the Gateway.

     We had not been to the beach since Scott and his girls were here, so I was needing some beach time.  We had planned to go after work on Tuesday, but the weather did not cooperate.  On Wednesday, which is a really slow day at the Food Warehouse, they actually told us to go home at lunchtime.  Elder Rappleye wasn't able to leave that early, but we did get away earlier than normal and the weather was perfect, so we headed to the beach.  The picture at the right is the sight we saw at Hukilau Beach, a huge camp set up.  It's a common site all summer long at the beaches.  The wards and other groups have weeklong camps on the beaches.  Hukilau is one of the larger campground areas along the windward side.  It's an ultimate staycation here in Hawaii.

      Just as we were driving to the beach, we got a call from the tire guy.  We had trouble last Sunday with low tire pressure, and Elder Rappleye noticed as he was airing the tire that we needed to get new tires put on the car. The nice thing with Elder Rappleye working in the motor pool is that he knows just the right people to call when we need help with our car.  Jeff Archibald is that right guy - the tire guy.  He comes to the PCC and does the work there, so we didn't have to go to town to get new tires put on the car.  He wanted to come install the tires around 4pm.  Since that wouldn't leave us much time at the beach, I decided to stay at the beach a little longer while Elder Rappleye drove back home, changed his clothes, and took the car to the motor pool area to meet Jeff and get the new tires put on.  I ended up walking about a mile in my flipflops from Hukilau beach to the PCC motor pool, and got there just as Jeff was finishing up installing the tires.

     

 On Thursday morning when I walked into the dock area of the food warehouse, I decided to take pictures of what it looks like when we get a big delivery.  This is a delivery from YHata.  We get a delivery every Monday and Thursday, and it's almost always a big order which means every Friday and Tuesday I am putting in a huge order to YHata.  In the bottom picture you can just see the heads of Jared and Rachel behind the pallets of boxes, and Lili, the food warehouse manager and Ralph over by the door. 

       

    Elder Rappleye, along with Bry, worked on the cart pictured to the left to resurrect it.  Elder Rappleye has nicknamed this cart the Green Dragon, and it was completely dead, not working at all.  When you look at all the rust on the back, you wonder why they would even bother resurrecting it.  New ones are pretty expensive, and it takes a long time to ship new ones out here to Hawaii, so they really try to keep the carts running and running and running for as long as they can.  Elder Rappleye wanted to just scrap it, but when he found a dime laying on a shelf by the dashboard, it reminded him of his dad and how his dad would never give up on fixing anything.  Seeing the dime was like his dad telling Elder Rappleye to not give up on the Green Dragon just yet.  They were able to find just the right used parts in the motor pool to get this monster working again.  We'll see how long it can keep running.

      This week was the first week in months that we were not assigned a night to do an Ask Me/Luau shift, so we had a free evening. 

      It also was a slow week for Elder Rappleye in the motor pool.  When he first arrived in November to help in the motor pool, he realized that the servicing of the carts was very disorganized.  No one seemed to know exactly how many carts there were, and they didn't have a system to keep track of which carts needed serviced when.  Elder Rappleye decided to make a list of all the carts, their numbers (each cart is assigned a number), and their location at the PCC.  Then he divided the number of carts, 87, by the four weeks in the month and assigned 22 carts a certain week of the month to get serviced, so by the end of the month every cart will have been serviced. This system has worked really well.  It helps to eliminate missed servicing of carts and helped let everyone who has a cart know what week they need to bring their cart over to the motor pool to get serviced.  If there is a fifth week in a month, like this last week was, it leaves the week wide open to work on other projects or keep on top of putting out the "fires" that pop up all the time.  

      After finding out last Saturday that the canoeing state championship was happening next Saturday, I sleuthed around the internet and finally found some site I could message, and they sent me the information of where and when they were held on Saturday.  So, we headed down to Ke-ehi Lagoon Park in Honolulu early Saturday morning.  We got about a mile from the park and the traffic was backed up so bad, that we decided to drive down a side road and find a place to park and walk the rest of the way.  We ended up walking 20 minutes to get to the event.  I had no idea it would be so popular.  It definitely reminded me of high school state championship track meets.

    Here is a picture of the board that shows the different races.  There were 44 races listed for that day.  The teams were aged from 12 - 70, and the categories were boys, girls, women, men, and mixed.  We could tell it was going to last all day.  We didn't have time to stay that long, but we stayed for about an hour and saw 6 to 8 races.

             We started out watching down by the finish line.  The beach was lined with canopy tents of all the different teams.  We just made our way through the crowd and found a good place to stand and watch.  We were surrounded by canoe team members and parents.  The pictures above are the races we watched from the finish line.  The first few races we watched were 1/2-mile distance races where the teams started and finished at the same spot.  They had to paddle out a 1/4 mile, go around a buoy, and back to the finish line.  The colored flags out in the water show where the start/finish line was.  Because the canoes spanned the whole length of the lagoon, it was hard to tell who crossed the finish line first.  You had to listen for the cheers.

     Pictured above are some of the canoe teams getting ready to head out to the starting line.

      Then we walked to the other end of the lagoon as close as we could get to the starting line and watched a few races from there.  These were the younger age teams, and they were only racing a quarter-mile distance, so they started on one end of the lagoon and paddled to the finish line.  We could see the canoes really well in the middle section of the race, but really couldn't see which canoes won.  

      The pictures above, clockwise from top left show the bay lined with covered tent shades, a team's row of paddles, the awards podium and one of the canoes. Ater about an hour, it was getting hot, and we didn't come prepared to stay all day with chairs, shade, water, etc.  We also needed to get some other things done while we were in town, so we headed back to where our car was parked.

      We ended the week with our monthly Munch and Mingle on Sunday evening.  This month there were no missionaries headed home during August (thus no pictures), so we did not sing Aloha 'Oe to wish them farewell, but because we have had so many new missionary couples arrive, they had a chance to learn and practice singing the original Hawaiian version of Aloha 'Oe that was written by Queen Liliuokalani. Aloha 'Oe means Farewell to Thee and is sung on all occasions of farewells here in Hawaii.