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Saturday, October 16, 1999

Maui's Wormhole to Costco

There used to be a raw-foods restaurant here. Everything on the menu was made completely of uncooked vegetation of one sort or another. I never braved a meal there, but I did try one of their deserts and it was fantastic. They were known for their deserts. Unfortunately, the place was started by a man and his girlfriend, and one day he started seeing another woman, and it was all down hill for the restaurant from there. This is Maui.

Costco is a worm hole. Everything in the Maui Costco is exactly the same price as in any other Costco, which actually means it's cheaper than in California because the sales tax is only 4 1/6% here. How can they sell fresh Atlantic Salmon in Maui for $6/lb? Costco is a worm hole. It's the only possible explanation.

The Maui Costco actually does have a few differences. Of note, they have a weird-foods isle including such items as dashi, glutonous rice, sesame oil, roasted sesame seeds, seaweed, palm hearts, and so on. They also have a few local favorites scatterred about the store, such as huge bags of Poi, and Manapuas. We got a bag of pork manapuas, but I was really hoping they'd have the curry chicken ones.

We drove down to Kihei to check out a hurricane motorcycle for sale. It was supposedly an '87 body with a '94 engine, but having owned an '87 hurricane (the first year they were made), I can say for sure this was not one. I would say it was a 90's CBR that had been crashed alot. I didn't buy it. I asked the guy how it was in the rain (it had a bald back tire) and he said "It doesn't rain here." Oh yeah, I forgot, we'd driven twenty miles and were in an entirely different climate than the one we'd left.

We called around for places to rent, but everything was taken already. Turns out houses for rent typically get on the order of thirty to eighty calls on the first day. Also turns out the ads run in the paper for at least a couple of weeks, so at any given time most of the places are already taken before the paper is even printed. So much for the illusion that it was going to be easy to find a place to rent here.

We got lazy by the end of the day, didn't want to drive the extra ten minutes into Paia for a Mahi burger, so we split a taco dinner at Pauli's, the local pseudo-mexican place in Makawao. Pauli's walls are coverred with framed extreme-sports photos, things like a guy surfing a wave six times his height, or today I noticed one of a helicopter straight ahead, flying over the ocean, and above and behind that there is a windsurfer at the apex of his jump.

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