Honeymoon Part 2: The Incident

Day 3 of our honeymoon started off really nice. We enjoyed a leisurely breakfast at the Pioneer Inn right on the shore of Lahaina. We had the full day to ourselves with nothing pre-planned. We explored the banyan tree and the old Lahaina courthouse. We talked about what we wanted to do, and finally decided to rent some snorkeling gear and snorkel around the island.

We sat riiiiight there!

We went to Boss Frog's, got our gear, and off we went! The snorkel guy told us we should go to Honolua Bay because it was really good around there, especially "this time of the day."

While Honolua Bay is beautiful, it sucks for a couple of reasons. 1, there's no real easy place to park. The five parking spots that exist are along a highway, and on a blind curve. 2, You have to hike down the side of a cliff to get there. Not terrible, just not ideal.

Honolua Bay sucked for several more reasons than that on this particular day... we couldn't find parking close by, so we parked on a turnout. So we had to walk a little further. But again, no biggie. As soon as we get there, the sun goes behind a cloud and it felt COLD. But it's Hawaii, so still warmer than what we're used to. We snorkeled for maybe 20 minutes and saw 2 or 3 fish. Not good snorkeling.

We decided to move further down the beach, so as we swam in, I took my mask and snorkel off. We got up to the shore and moved down to the other end of the bay. When I went to put my mask back on, my snorkel was missing! I had no idea where I had lost it, so we went back down to where we had started, and went back out to scan the bottom of the ocean. We couldn't find it anywhere, and I felt horrible because I thought we were going to have to pay to replace the whole thing. How could I be so stupid???

Brian was really awesome about it though. He told me not to worry, and just to have fun. So I did. We hung out on the beach in the shallow water and played around for a bit. Then we decided to head back to the car and maybe try a different location. So we hiked back up and as we got closer to the car, I asked if we could still take a picture. See, since we parked on the turn out, there was a really good lookout spot that faced the north side of the island.

Brian popped the trunk with the remote and I ran up to the car to grab his camera from my purse. But when I got to the trunk, it was empty. "My purse isn't in here," I yelled back to Brian with a sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach. "What do you mean?' he asked. "Is it in the front seat?" I replied that I knew I had put it in the trunk when we grabbed our snorkeling gear, but I ran up to the front to check anyway. Sure enough, nothing.

Brian was starting to sound angry. We both went through a couple seconds of denial before we were ready to admit what had happened... somebody stole our stuff.

When I say our stuff, I mean EVERYTHING. We had both of our new iphones, Brian's camera, both of our wallets with all of our credit cards and cash, Brian's new Oakley sunglasses, and Brian's new Kindle in my purse. As dumb as it sounds looking back, we I made a conscious decision to leave all of our valuables in the trunk. It seemed safer than leaving it in the front of the car or leaving it unattended on the beach. But, oh yeah, I forgot the f*cking car was a convertible!!!

After doing a walk around the car, we discovered that the douche bag slashed a hole in the canvas roof and popped the trunk open.

We both realized that our hotel keys were in my purse, and this prick had our ID's. We also had left our new rings in our hotel room, and we were afraid this idiot was going to manage to get into our room and take even more. We hightailed it back to the hotel and told them what happened. They gave Brian new keys and he ran up there while they got me in touch with the Maui PD to report it.

As silly as it sounds, the next step while we waited for the cops was to log onto our emails and facebooks and change our passwords. Because our smart phones are so, um, smart, the asshole actually had access to all of that information too. We didn't want him to have even more access to our personal information.

The officers showed up pretty quickly to take our information and begin the report. The report is important because it is literally THE ONLY way we had to prove who we were in order to get back on the plane to get home. But I guess if you're going to be stuck somewhere, it might as well be Hawaii, right? One of the officers told us not to worry, they usually find a lot of this stuff because it's an island and these guys have no where to go. We kind of laughed that off. Hasn't the dude every heard of Craig's List? Or is that just a mainland thing?

Anyway, we went back up to our room after that and spent the rest of the afternoon canceling credit cards and turning off our phones. the whole day pretty much sucked. The only good thing was that when we went to return the snorkel gear, they told us not to worry about my lost snorkel. So we caught a break there.

We had $100 in those credit card gift cards, but we weren't sure how long we would have to make those last. Luckily for us, we had bought most of our activities the day before, so we still had things to look forward to. In fact, our bike ride down the volcano Haleakala was the very next day. We had an early wake up call- 1:00am, to be exact. So before we called it a night, we went to Wal-mart and bought some water, and then shared some Chicken McNuggets for dinner, and with each purchase, we prayed they would accept our gift cards.

At 8:00, we were in bed, trying to relax after our worst day on our honeymoon, in our marriage, and possibly even in our entire relationship.

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We did have the chance to contact our parents, who were concerned and upset for us, but they jumped right in and helped. Brian's parents wired us money the following day and my parents emailed us documents to help us get back on our plane. The situation would have been much more difficult without all of their help...

   
I will say this about us... we work well together, especially in a crisis situation. We balanced each other- he was angry at first and I was able to stay calm and help us figure out our next steps. Then I started to get upset and he was able to calm me down and cheer me up. We worked as a team, and helped each other as we both needed it.

         

We sat with each other and decided that since we were stuck in Maui for at least another 4 and a half days, we could either feel sorry for ourselves  and have a horrible time, or we could remember that we're on our honeymoon, we already paid for some activities that we were really looking forward to, and we could have the best time possible. We decided on the latter. We sucked it up and we were determined to have fun. Of course, that wasn't always easy. There were times that I wanted to look back at a picture we had taken but couldn't because we had no camera! And it was also very disconcerting not to have the comfort of the GPS on my phone. And I couldn't just text my mom to ask her how the dog was doing and have her send us a picture. We're actually still trying to sort everything out and it's a week later.

We came out of the situation stronger and smarter. We learned a lot about each other and about what's really important. We still had each other, we still had our love, and we did manage to still have a lot of fun, and that's something no one can take from us.