We are spending the winter in Waikoloa Beach. We have been here 3 full weeks and we are in heaven. We are so completely grateful.  Understand, we totally loved spending time in Waimea, it is a great little cowboy (Paniolo) town of roughly 10,000 people. Everyone says aloha to you. There is such a strong feeling of community in Waimea. It is unlike anywhere I have ever lived. We made so many friends, so very quickly. But, Waimea is cold and rainy during the winter. Allow me to correct myself. Waimea is cold, rainy, wet, and windy during the winter. This is not what we signed up for when we moved to Hawaii. We are so glad to be out of there.

In contrast, Waikoloa Beach is too hot during the summer, but now has cooled down to a beautiful temperature. Days are 76 degrees, nights are 58 degrees.  Instead of 20 minutes drive to the beach (from Waimea), we have a 5 minute walk to the beach. Instead of maybe seeing a sunset on occasion, we see the most spectacular sunsets almost every night. Last night we, my wife Leise and I, went on a nice little walk across the street to the beach. We turned north and walked along the shore line.  Luckily I took my camera with me. The camera picked up colors in the sunset that neither of our eyes could perceive. The result is the photo you see above.

Last Saturday I went up to help my friend Dave Steiner, owner/farmer of Javaloha coffee, tend his booth at Waimea’s Parker School Farmers Market. The morning was cold, wet, and windy.  When I say windy I am talking about microbursts which lifted his tent up while being weighted down by a 200 lb. man, stakes and sand bags. I had to leap across the tent to grab the guy around the waist and stop him from flying away. It was miserable. The weather turned nice around 11:30 am, then a light rain started at 1:00 pm. It slowly got worse and then just became really wet as we were packing up everything. It was so very nice to drive down the hill back to Waikoloa Beach, only 30 minutes away.  Half way down the mountain the rain stopped, the temperature rose and I was able to put the top down on the convertible.

We are very excited to go to the beach almost every day, instead of every couple weeks (like we did when we lived in Waimea). I am most excited to be at the beach for the winter because the whales have started showing up and will stay through March. We feel truly blessed to live in a place like this which has such great diversity so close to each other. We are grateful for moving to the beach for the winter. We might need two houses, one for the summer up the mountain and one for the winter at the beach.

Aloha,

James Christopher

ThruJimsEyes.com