davidd's A DOLL A DAY 2023

[davidd]

I'd just wanna go up Mt Ka'ala Rd and wander into the mountains.
...hey, there's a monastery up there?!  Is that an option? 
I'm not sure I'd be able to look at it, in your position.  I will not go on Google street view to look up the house I grew up in, and the one time I went back to the city, I did NOT drive by.

Ohhhh.... The Long Road! That's what the road from the North Shore side is called locally!  It looks like I took down all my Flickr photos from my running days, when I used to jog up the Road to Mt. Ka'ala! I did that run a few times. Ultra-runners and Iron Man competitors used to use the road for training runs and training bike rides.

As an aside, the missing photos are another story of an ill-advised change of venue: I got tired of Flickr's nonsense during the Yahoo / Verizon years, particularly when that nasty piece of work CEO at Yahoo started making huge changes, and I began deleting my Flickr photos, starting with the most-viewed. I was going to move to iPernity. Yeah, well, that didn't pan out, and now I've lost or misplaced thousands of images, including my most popular, along with the captions and comments.

Anyway, back when I was Not Fat, I got myself in to such good shape that I could jog up the Long Road to near the top of Mt. Ka'ala. You can't actually go up to the radar dome on the top, but if you followed the road to the very end, it took you to an abandoned missile launch facility... which you can see if you scroll down to Item No. 8 in this article:

https://www.onlyinyourstate.com/hawaii/abandoned-hi/

That's actually my photo they used in the article. Picture 3 is also my photo -- I encountered wasps on that little adventure, much to the amusement of a couple of old guys sitting on their porch across the street.

I climbed up those towers a couple of times. Then... can you believe it... a year or two before I left Oahu, "the government" decided the old towers were a hazard... even though they'd been abandoned for like fifty years... and they tore them down. Totally leveled them. I went up there one day and... gone. Barely even a cement slab on the ground.

It was possible to continue up a narrow, muddy trail behind the missile site to a ridge where you could see the ocean on both sides of the island.

The U of Hawaii has a native plant nursery up there now. And one time I saw a pair of Nene geese, who must have flown over from the Big Island.

And to think... I lived there! 

As for the monastery -- crazy enough, a relative of a relative spent some time there. She showed up and told them she wanted to become a nun. The monks, who were apparently all very elderly, let her stay there for about three weeks. Finally they had to insist that she leave, as her dependence on her cell phone did not mesh well with their largely tech-free and silent lives. 

My brother and I sold the Oregon house we grew up in a couple of years ago. I drove by once, a few months after we sold it, and the new owners were already junking up the place with a bunch of beat-up cars. We sold the vacant orchard lot next door separately, and the trees had been cut down and a new multi-storey house was already going up. My brother told me to not ever drive out to where my grandparents once had a 40-acre farm. He said the whole area had been developed and was unrecognizable and heart-breaking. My brother is not prone to emotionalism, so it must be pretty bad for him to have said that.

I'm gonna go play in my make-believe doll world now:

21 January - A Doll a Day 2023:

21 January - Dive & Bait Shop Guy