We’re in Hawaii this week, bringing the Good News of the NIT to those not naturally blessed with Truth (vacationing Australian families at Waikiki Beach). The ocean is blue and the skies are blue and it seems like since 2021, tensions have calmed down between tourists and the East Maui locals. Hospitality here is indeed on a level beyond that anywhere else, or at least anywhere else I’ve seen. Accordingly, I’ve demoted Fargo, North Dakota to the second-kindest place I’ve visited. First place goes to any hotel in Hawaii.
Like most places, Hawaii is funny. For example: It is possible the residents of Hawaii have everything figured out, and that all of the rest of us continuously surrender our chance at fulfillment by living in places other than Hawaii. Also? Around the time Thomas Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence, Hawaii’s first king (Kamehameha I, the guy who unified the islands) was beating a rival’s top warrior to death with a shark tooth-studded club. And the Europeans thought they were the advanced society.
We’re staying in Hana the next few nights, meaning yesterday, we drove the Hana Highway from Paia, where the bartender made me feel like a savvy adult and not a child when I ordered a root beer to go with my pizza. The Hana Highway—the Road to Hana, as it is more dramatically called on t-shirts and in the lunchrooms of mainland Fortune 500 companies—is indeed winding and narrow, and I could see it feeling quite dangerous if it were pouring down rain. For us, it was not dangerous. It was stressful, but not dangerous. I was scared I was going to have to navigate a logistically complicated fender bender, one with rental cars and no cell reception and nowhere great to pull off and wait for the cops. This is very different from fearing for one’s life.
One of the things that complicates the Road to Hana is the bathroom situation. Where are they? It’s uncertain. Places unexpectedly close; bathrooms somehow move; guidebooks are quickly outdated. This would be less of an issue if the Code of Conduct for the Road to Hana didn’t tell you not to pee on the side of the road, alongside many admonitions for disrespecting sacred Hawaiian places. It would also be less of an issue if my unborn child wasn’t kicking my wife’s bladder every few minutes as part of his first hilarious prank against the establishment. In Paia—where the bartender even excitedly offered me a refill on my root beer, further confirming that I am a 29-year-old man and not a 10-year-old boy and that root beer is indeed the preferred culinary accompaniment to a Kakua pork flatbread—we made a shared iPhone note with the mile marker of every suspected bathroom on the route. I should probably turn that into a blog post. That seems like it would be of more service and interest than most things we do.
Obviously, late in the afternoon, eating coconut ice cream at Coconut Glen’s while an orange cat snored on the table next to us, conversation turned to how much money you could make on the Road to Hana by operating a really clean bathroom. Charge a dollar per use, sell water bottles and snacks, send some underpaid Californian into the loo after every customer to keep it shiny and bright. This is basically how Buc-ee’s started. We reverse engineered Buc-ee’s, but for a road internationally famed for being natural and “untouched.”
As beautiful a statement as it would be, Buc-ee’s planting its flag at the end of the earth, it cannot be done. There cannot be a Buc-ee’s on the Road to Hana. It is impossible! There is simply no space. I do, though, kind of want to do the bathroom idea. Travel bloggers would rave about it. Imagine the pranks my unborn son could get up to if he grew up in a trailer behind the most critically acclaimed toilet in the world.
