(Regular readers know to rest their mouse pointers on photos for captions.)

The new Mr. and Mrs. “Wilco” had made it very clear to their wedding guests that this is not their honeymoon and they do not need time alone and to please not avoid them. On that same vein, Christi made lunch reservations for about twenty of us at a pretty famous (as far as famous goes in an island village) Asian fusion restaurant called Bamboo at historic smalltown Hawi, at the top northernmost tip of the island.

On the drive north, I prepared to take an in-context photo of the “Better Together” roadside graffiti, and as we rounded the corner, I started snapping away and saw…the molestation of the sign.

The sign was all the talk when we met up with the wedding people. Mr. W and I were able to chat with and get to know the other wedding guests a little better at this lunch, as well as trade stories about everyone’s Hawaii experiences thus far. Not just tourist stories and the couple’s behind-the-scenes wedding stories (such as how Mike really DID want to play cheesy wedding games but was vetoed), but for example, another wedding guest couple got engaged the day before the wedding in Hawaii, at what turned out to be one of the worst marriage proposals ever (girl’s opinion). It went something like this: guy pops the question on the beach, pops open the ring box, and both pairs of eyes pop as they see the box is empty. Girl thinks it’s a tasteless not-funny joke, but was wrong about it being a joke; guy panics and goes back to the room to see if it’d maybe fallen out there while girl sits on the sand guarding the same spot in case ring had popped out there. Luckily, they find the ring, buried inside the sand, and don’t know how that could’ve happened. He puts the ring on her finger when she accepts the proposal, but it only fits as far down as to the top of the first knuckle. Turns out he’d remembered her ring size wrong and was off by two whole sizes. Girl, we heard, had to go back to her room to recover from the proposal.

After lunch, half of us stayed and explored the town, had ice cream…

…took photos, and we all decided to go to Lookout Point, where the street ends and you’re supposed to be able to look over the water and see Maui or Kauai or something.

Turned out that Lookout Point wasn’t only a lookout, it was also a steep hike zigzagging down the mountainside to a black sand beach.

Since everyone drove separately, we all got there at separate times but Mr. W and I were lucky enough to run into the newlyweds.

Mike and Christi made it down the trail fairly quickly, snapping photos with their intimidating large-lensed cameras as they went.

Mr. W and I went much more slowly, as he painstakingly took incredible care in setting up each of his shots of every insect, fungus, shrub, skyline, rock and dirt clod.

We’d lost Mike and Christi for about 15 minutes when my right foot slipped and SNAP! the top of my slipper-style sandal disconnected from the base. There was no way I could make it down the rocky pathway with one shoe, so Mr. W decided (to my disappointment) to turn back and hike back up the hill to the car. I left Mike a message on his cell phone and Mr. W and I drove to what was described by the tourbook as arguably the best beach on the island, Hapuna Beach, within walking distance of Mike and Christi’s wedding site.

Mike and Christi surprised us by showing up there minutes after we’d gotten there, and the four of us took photos of the sunset and each other, Mike and Christi with their professional expensive cameras with the lens more expensive than the Hawaii trip, Mr. W with his slightly-less-professional partial-SLR camera, me with my trusty cameraphone (laugh if you want, but I was the only one who was able to instantly send watery sunset photos to my mom in California and Jordan in Florida, so there).


While there, I had a phone conversation with my mom, who called me to ask what the hell I was sending to her phone as she didn’t know how to open the images, and she informed us it was the autumn Chinese Moon Festival that night, so we all took pictures of the huge full moon, too.

“None of you or your friends know that it’s tonight?” my mom asked in surprise. The three of us white-washed Asian kids plus the one white dude looked blankly at each other. *blink* In that phone conversation, my parents also offered to buy me the Alexandrite ring. I protested it, said it was too extravagant and unnecessary, fought off their offers to gift it as an engagement present or a wedding present, until my mom hit the logic chord. I should take her credit card information and purchase the ring on the Island, she reasoned, so that I could have it in-hand instead of having to wait for them to mail something so expensive to me after purchasing it, and what if they swap out the stone and mail me a fake? I didn’t think the last part would happen, but the first part made sense. I promised to pay them back for the loan, but she insisted it wouldn’t be a loan.

Christi was excited for me when I told her about the ring and they followed us back to Kailua-Kona town, where we were all going to meet for dinner anyway, and came into the jewelry store with us. I’d called our sales guy, Ron, to tell him I’d be coming for the ring that night and he’d offered to hold the store open as late as we needed to get back into town as a favor, but luckily we got there well before closing. The ring was instantly resized (turned out what I’d thought was a good fit wasn’t good enough for either Ron or the owner of the store, both of whom thought it should be sized from a 7 down to a 5.75 to be perfectly secure on my right middle finger, and they were right) as Ron ran my parents’ credit card information through the machine…and it came back “declined.” What the heck. My parents have responsible credit habits and never carry a balance. He ran it again. Declined. I called my parents at home and heard myself whining to them. They were understandably concerned, too, especially since it turned out they’d misheard the price of the ring and thought I’d told them it was $1000, but gave me another card to try, and that one came back “Call Credit Center.” Turned out that for purchases over $4000, some credit card companies require a physical confirmation of the legitimacy of the purchase, which is a pretty good thing, I suppose. The second card was eventually approved, and I was given my ring. YAY!!! Along with another free CD of songs composed by Ron (Mike and Christi got one, too) and a free bottle of cabernet sauvignon. I am so paying my parents back, tho.

The four of us met up with Greg and Cheryl and some other people of the wedding party who could not make it to lunch and had a nice dinner in town. The large round table had a white butcher block papercloth along with a bunch of crayons for us to draw with, so Greg snatched a red crayon and wrote in big block letters in the center of the table “JUST MARRIED” with arrows pointing toward Christi and Mike. I drew some hearts around the words in gray crayon, and two more arrows pointing toward Cheryl and Greg. The latter two protested they weren’t “just” married, they were married a month ago, so they weren’t truly newlyweds. “Oldlyweds,” Cheryl called themselves. I said it was new enough, so Greg clarified his table label with a different color crayon by writing “9/22” by Mike/Christi’ arrows, and “8/11” by his own arrows. Then he drew two more arrows pointing toward me and Mr. W and labeled those arrows “9 years later.” Not to be outdone, the other half of the table, 3 young unwed and unengaged friends, grabbed their own crayon and wrote “SINGLE” with three arrows pointing at themselves. I suggested they write phone numbers for their numbers, but no takers. Right when we were about to hand over the check, the restaurant, along with that entire side of town, lost electricity. We found ourselves sitting in darkness until suddenly, there was a click and everyone laughed as one member of the party put a small but very bright flashlight pointing up on the table. Talk about prepared! And then Mike emerged with another flashlight. “You guys are so funny!” I said. Another guest joked, “I thought you were going to use a whole different word aside from funny.” It was a bit geeky of them, but luckily so. We paid our bill, the “true” newlyweds dropped us off at our hotel (which was probably the first building we came to that was unaffected by the blackout, which turned out was due to a traffic accident), and we called it a night.