Two years ago a group of us went on a Trudy adventure to Oahu where Trudy was attending the biannual Pacific Seabird Conference. The conference hotel was $400 a night but Trudy found a campsite nearby that only charged $9/person/night. We would drop her off at the resort in the morning, have coffee there, use the resort’s internet, make use of their beach, showers and washrooms, and pick Trudy up at the end of the day along with conference left-over boxed lunches. Back at the camp we would hunt for wild chicken eggs in the surrounding bushes for our breakfast. I am proud to say we did Hawaii for less than $50/day.

Two years later we are going upscale. We rented a VWCamper van called Janie. She’s beautiful! It still costs $9/person/night for a campsite as well as Janie but with hotels $300 and up, she is a real deal. And fun.

We took her south to Salt Pond County Park and set her up and went for a swim. Salt Pond is named for a traditional salt field next door, a low lying field of red iron oxide mud. A local told us that every ten years a group of families came and did whatever was necessary to the field (flood it with seawater?) and left it to do it’s thing (evaporate?).

There are birds everywhere, mostly on the ground, mostly chickens and beautiful cocky red roosters, mryna birds, zebra doves and a couple red crested Cardinals. Coming back I collected a few feathers because that’s what I do. I remember putting the feathers somewhere safe so the wind wouldn’t blow them away. Then I lost the van keys somewhere in the van. Thirty minutes of hunting produced nothing. I knew if I could remember where I put the feathers I could find the keys. I said to worry, they will turn up in a couple of days. Today was day 1, we had all the time in the world to relax and let the keys (and feathers) reveal themselves which they did within hours one I concentrated on the feathers and found the keys in the day pack I had already searched three times.

One disaster averted.

We have just lived with over a week of snow and below freezing temperatures. Time to head for the sun.

Cathy kindly dropped us for the PIsle ferry and we were feeling pretty pleased with ourselves for being 8 mins early. We waved goodbye and headed down the ramp to the ferry with Trudy patting her pockets. ‘ I can’t find my phone!’. Trudy is not just going to Kauai but proceeding onwards to Philip Island off Norfolk Island to volunteer at some bird project, then on to Australia. She will need her phone. We unpacked on the dock. Nada. While Trudy ran home to retrieveI phoned Cathy to meet Trudy at her place and once again, get her to the ferry on time. Which she managed.

Years ago, my very first adventure with Trudy started with a friend warning me that travel with Trudy always is an ‘adventure’. That seemed to check out when I phoned her to ask about gear needed to hunt old growth bats in the west coast. Her daughter answered the phone with a rapid staccato ‘ Mom can’t come to the phone. The BBQ is on fire and the house is burning down’. Click.

An old boyfriend of Trudy’s, reinforced the idea of Trudy adventures when he said he loved adventuring with Trudy because when you got home you felt so lucky to be alive!

On Trudy adventure I have learned that you need to figure out early, what item of Trudy’s is most important and keep your eye on it. In past it has been her car keys. Sometimes her binoculars. It seems to be her phone on this trip.

The day started with meeting Roland, a local who invited us to share a pomelo with us or perhaps more accurately to show us how to crack it open to eat it. It is like a giant grapefruit but sweeter. Roland showed us and then he was off to Waimea days to go to the rodeo.

Last night was a lesson in the world of chickens. As dusk approached, the head honcho roosters made their way to a tree with a large, wide branch structure and hoped and flapped up into the canopy, at which point they let out a cockadoodledo as if to say ‘Everybody to bed.’ This scenario was repeated, cockadoodledo, throughout the campground, cockadoodledo, as the various groups invaded the trees, cockadoodledo. I didn’t see any moms with chicks, I suspected they hid in the bushes across the road. Cockadoodledo. You get the picture.

At this point, Ian and I (Trudy being somewhere else) looked up at the tree, loaded with noisy chickens above their tent and then looked down at the tent, then at each other and silently pulled up stakes and moved it into the open field.

Roosters everywhere.

I had the good fortune to be sleeping in the van; poorer view but more relaxing soundscape or so I thought until woken by 4 police cars with blue lights flashing, interested in someone in a deep sleep inside a car parked nearby. They were quiet but determined to wake him. Knocking on the windows didn’t budge the sound sleeper. This wasn’t a big city take-down, this was a Hawaiian wake-up. One police officer went into the chicken-and-chicks infested bush causing some clucking and came out with a long thin stick which he poked through the cracks in the window and poked the guy awake. There was a brief quiet discussion and then the four police cars headed off and the guy, chickens, chicks and me, all went back to sleep.

At around 3a.m. the roosters again cockadoodledo-ed as if to say ‘it’s 3a.m. and all is well’. This was repeated up and down the campground before settling down for a couple of more hours when they cockadoodledo-ed again around dawn to wake everyone up.

We headed north up the Waimea Canyon seven mile up hill all the way to over 4,000 ft, as far as the road goes, stopping at every lookout where we fed on each spectacular view both to the canyon on the east and to the dramatic coastline on the west.

At Pu’u o Lila lookout we started to hike further up to the Alaki Swamp, the wettest place on earth with an average annual 423 inches of rain! We however were lucky enough to hike in on one of the rare dry days.

A couple of hundred yards

Thanks for joining me!

Good company in a journey makes the way seem shorter. — Izaak Walton