Well I’ve totally messed this up. I thought as I stared
out airplane window at the expanse of ocean stretching from horizon to horizon,
30,000 feet below me. The problem was I had never seen the ocean before. I grew
up in a tiny land locked town in Nebraska. It was the same town my mom had
grown up in, and my mom’s mom, and, well, you get the point. My family had been
there forever, since the days of prairie schooners skimming across the amber waves
of grain. When I was a child, I used to lay out in the middle of the fields on the
farm in the late afternoon listening to the wind blow through the wheat, and
pretend it was the ocean pounding against the sand.
When I was five my aunt Laura got married. She went to
Hawaii for her honeymoon and came back with stories of sea turtles skirting the
ocean cliffs and dolphins playing in waves illuminated by magical orange
sunsets. She also brought me a shell that when I held it up to my ear I could
hear the crashing of the waves on the sand. From that moment forward the only
thing I wanted in my entire life was to dip my feet in the ocean.
So traveling to Hawaii is expensive. Sure, there are other,
cheaper beaches to visit. I certainly had the opportunity to go in with my
college roommates on a spring break trip to Cancun, or take a road trip to the
coast, East or West, but it was Hawaii I was daydreaming about since I was five,
and I just couldn’t imagine going to any other beach first.
It was the money my Aunt Laura gave me for my college
graduation that pushed my budget from dream-land to actually going. I purchased
one round trip ticket to Kauai, booked the cheapest hotel I could find, and instead
of starting my job hunt I was counting down the days to my very first trip to
the beach. Which was why I nearly freaked out when I looked down from the
airplane and saw the ocean below. The perfect picture I had in my head of
seeing the ocean for the first time, and sprinting across the perfect white
powder sand into the azure ocean sunset, was being utterly ruined because I
failed to realize I would have to fly over the ocean, in order to see the ocean
from an island in the MIDDLE OF THE OCEAN!
I slid my window shade shut and decided to pretend it didn’t
happen.
The plane landed at 3:05 PM, right on time. I collected my
luggage, found the shuttle for my hotel, and was on my way. By 5:30 PM I had dropped
my luggage in my room and made my way to the beach. Just as the sun was setting,
I dipped my toes in the amber waves of the ocean for the first time.
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