My little sister and I have always been different from each other, and attack problems in our own ways. Which is probably why we don’t travel well together, we are just have different travel styles. This meant family vacations usually had a lot of little strifes and our first trip to Hawaii was full of them. I was just about to start middle school, while my little sister was in grade school. She had just had a huge growth spurt, and so was now taller than me. My parents were determined that we should get along better, so when we stopped to visit the Dole Plantation, my mother thought it was a stellar idea for us to try the Pineapple Maze together.
The maze is almost 3 miles long, and is made only with traditional and local plants of Hawaii. (They even have a Guinness World Record for longest native Hawaiian plant maze…which…where else would you have it? And why would that even have competition??)
Well, the problem was that it was raining hard. So my parents watched comfortably from the main building as my sister and I headed into the maze. My mother watched then in horror as each of us barreled into the maze…in different directions. I remember being cold, wet, muddy (with red Hawaiian mud, that stained my shoes and clothes permanently) while simultaneously yelling or being yelled at by my sister trying to find our way. Eventually we gave up, and just went through a small hole in the plants to get out. Not a very good “relationship building” exercise as we found out.
Travel Missteps is an every-other week series on how sometimes part of the journey is making mistakes and getting lost.
Very funny memory when you both immediately went in opposite directions unbeknown to the other!