I'm Freezing My Toes Off on This Mountain 

  

          So the bus was scheduled to arrive in Captain Cook at 5:15pm, but the traffic was ridiculous, and at one point we took a detour that was an enormous waste of time, and seemed to serve purpose at all.  But that's for later.  Firstly, I got on the bus after arriving at the bus stop forty-five minutes early so as to be perfectly sure that I would not miss it.  And then, halfway through my wait, I began to angst over the possibility that the bus would not accept my student I.D. as payment because it was going all the way to Kona, even though it was the same Hele-on company as all the other buses I ride and should by all rights follow the same policies.  This worry plagued me for a whole twenty minutes, and I began to panic because I had maybe seven pennies in my change purse, which is nowhere near enough to board the bus, and so I would not be able to go to Kona to see my best friend because I was too stupid to plan ahead and do the research to see if they accepted student I.D.s for the trip to Kona, and by the time the bus arrived, I had driven myself almost to the point of tears because, lets face it... I'm a bit irrational and emotionally unstable. 

          I climbed the three stairs to where the bus driver sat, residing over bus patrons and island travel.  The short walk felt to me as though it was taking a century, and my legs were on the verge of turning to jelly.  A light sheen of sweat covered my forehead, and as I walked I was tenuously holding my I.D out in front of me as if it were a shield from denial of entry, but I wasn't sure how good of a shield it was and I was entering the bus as warily as if I was walking onto a medieval battlefield.  When I finally reached the bus driver, he slowly looked up from his clipboard and his gaze went from my card to my face and back to my card.  He asked "What's this?" and my heart almost stopped.  My mouth was very dry and my voice came out pained and a bit whiny. "My student I.D.?" My voice kind of cracked at the end, and rather than it being a declarative sentence, it came out a question.  I felt like Kristen Stewart.  My happiness depended on his reply, and when he finally said "Ok." I almost cried in relief. 

          I shouldered my way to almost the back of the bus, and chose a seat as far away from all other passengers as possible, and after seating myself by the window, I piled my bags on the seat next to me, pulled out my computer,put a movie and my headphones in, and proceeded to settle in for what I hoped would be a relatively bearable and quiet ride.  This worked pretty well in my favor until we got to downtown, and at the bus station was a truly huge crowd of people waiting to board the bus, and I'm an idiot because I didn't even pretend to be asleep like a smart me would do.  I suppose I was still a bit traumatized from my earlier self-induced panic frenzy, which is essentially what it was.  I think.  Anyway, I assumed that there were plenty of seats for everybody, and nobody could possibly need to sit next to me.  I was wrong.

          I had to endure an entire hour of awkwardly sitting by somebody whilst watching My Big Fat Greek Wedding...I wasn't made for socialization.  I really wanted my bus mate to leave, and when he finally did, I wasted no time re-erecting my barrier against my fellows.  By this time I had finished my movie and had resorted to staring out the window for entertainment because reading gives me motion sickness.  Hawaii really is quite beautiful.  When I'm not in Pahoa, it's easy to like Hawaii, but Puna makes it terribly difficult.  But that's quite beside the point.  After learning the hard way and having to sit next to somebody, every time we stopped the bus to let someone board it, I pretended to be asleep, and nobody asked me to move my things so that they could sit down.  It was a success....until we reached Waimea and picked up a horde of school children.  I had to give up my empty seat to a little girl, and children were sitting and standing in the isle from literally the very back of the bus to the front.  About twenty minutes later, we reached a preparatory school campus and turned into the driveway.  There was a palpable sense of relief on the bus, as everybody assumed that we would soon be free of all the kids.  This was not the case.  We drove slowly and aimlessly through the campus all the way to the end, and then we turned around and drove back out the driveway without stopping to let anybody off.  Yes, you read that correctly.  We drove through a school campus with a bus full of people that needed to get to their destinations on time for no apparent reason at all.  I was really pissed off.

          Eventually we dropped all the kids off and reached a shopping center where we dropped even more people off.  It was roughly 4:30pm at that time and I said to myself "I will reach Captain Cook on time and all will be well."  Yeah... that didn't quite happen as planned.  We drove through some lovely resort towns, and past some quite scenic beaches for two more hours, and stopped to pick up more freaking people before we reached another highway which we traveled on for some ways.  At this point I began to panic again, because Keegan was supposed to meet me at the Choice Mart at 5:15ish and every moment we were on the highway was another moment later I would be.  Several times I got up to ask the bus driver questions, and I eventually convinced him to drop me off at the Choice Mart.  He didn't do quite that; he dropped me off in sight of and across the street from it.  It was 6:00 before I actually reached it, and  I was hoping and praying that Keegan would still be there when I arrived, and miracle of miracles, she was! Then I went to her new house and we hung out and stuff. Here's some pictures. 

This is me and Keegan with a giant container of Nutella.  I'm pointing to it with an idiotic expression on my face.  I have no clue what Keegan is doing. None at all.

We pressed our faces really close together to symbolize how close we are as friends.  Because we were bored and stupid.  Yep, that's us.

Keegan likes to make faces in the camera, and she also enjoys not warning me that she is about to take a picture.  Because she's thoughtful like that.  This is me, staring off into space with a platonic expression because it's my "off mode".  The off mode is initiated by boredom.  I was only bored for a few minutes because we were taking pictures.

           It gets super cold on this mountain at night and I had to put on flannel pajama pants tucked into fuzzy pink tube socks, a thick sweatshirt that I got at Myrtle Beach last year and we slept under like six blankets.  I didn't start to get warm again until around noon.  Yeah... its cold up here, but tomorrow we're going to the beach.  I hope you enjoyed my post today, and all of these silly pictures.  Here's one random one for the road.