Kapolei Today: Everybody Needs a Vacation

Kapolei Today

Michael Hege RA - Kapolei Realty, Inc

Kapolei Today: Everybody Needs a Vacation

Everybody Needs a Vacation

There's nothing quite like a vacation to make one start to watch the calendar and think of all the things they need to do before they go. Even when you live somewhere like we are lucky enough to live, a change of pace is immensely exciting.

Camp 6 Employee Housing

I've been lucky enough to live in some really nice places, and one of my favorites is Yosemite. When I lived there before, it cost me $5.95 a week for a shared tent and 3 meals a day at the employee cafeteria. I made $1.35 an hour and when I think of my favorite all time jobs, it is one of them. It was a coming of age for me with each new friend sharing experiences at a time in my life when I was open to suggestions. Yosemite has been a special place for me ever since.

I still stay in touch with the most unlikely life long friend I ever could have imagined, Arvi Dorsey. He is in his 80's now and if I had half the energy he has today, I would consider myself lucky in deed. He is the consumate example of anything you set your mind to is possible. Active in his community, politics and his work, you just can't help but be energized when you are around him. But the thing he always worked the hardest at was friendships and relationships. A master of the handwritten letter and a genuine interest in the 100's of people who crossed his path during his career at Yosemite, he remembers us all and found the good in all of us. Somewhere in a personnel file on the jacket of my file there is an "ADP" on it. Arvi Dorsey Product.

It was just that kind of a place. My first experience with people from all over the planet who were drawn to a magical place. I remember thunderstorms in vast alpine meadows where the entire force of the planet seemed to be right above my head. Summer solstice from a perch above the valley where the majesty of the universe seemed to fit perfectly into the confines of the valley itself. Conversations that went deep into the night that stay with you the rest of your life. It is the place that I began to understand what a huge world it was.

YosemiteMoon400.jpg image by RadiomonkeyCaso

YosemiteMoon400.jpg image by RadiomonkeyCaso

The time I spent there was so important to me that I can trace most of my other significant events in my life to that summer and fall. Arvi took me to Colorado from there and introduced me to a friend whose sister became my wife. Yosemite put me in Colorado which put me in New Mexico which took me to Minnesota and Kansas. All from a letter of interest I wrote from my dorm room in college as my freshman year came to a close. I definately got my postage worth on that letter.

My daughter spent a summer there when she was in college and had her own life shaping experiences. My love of living where I love was something I missed more than I knew in the middle years of my life, and it is one of the great parts of living where I live now. It almost seems as though I have made a full circle and come back to the type of life that I always loved the most.

And now I get to go back there for some time to revisit all those thoughts and memories. A reunion of sorts, we will have our daughter rendevous with us along with some of my oldest friends and we will have some good times and good food. If you ever want to enjoy Yosemite from a place of comfort, it is a little known fact that there are actually privately owned cabins in Wowona and they are well managed and they have a great website.

The Redwoods in Yosemite

Some of my favorite vacations are new places and some of my favorites are old comfortable places... a lot like shoes I suppose. It all depends on what you're in the mood for. This time, I'm in the mood to float down my old friend, the Merced river. To sit on a rock at Inspiration Point and remember the awe I felt the first time I saw it. To circle the valley floor and feel the walls of the valley leap from the floor straight into the clouds. To take some time and make sure I remember how lucky I am for a thousand reasons.

And maybe, if I'm really lucky, to find myself in a grassy meadow with pouring rain with the echo of thunderstorms off the walls of the granite as the clawed hands of heaven and earth each reach to greet themselves in the greatest lightshow on earth. It just doesn't get better than that.