For the Love of Hawai'i

Hawai'i: A Love Story

The founder story in four parts: how one trip in May 2002 - my 50th state, at age 21 - rearranged my life and built Hawaii-Guide.com. Part Two is the Road to Hana days that built to the moment. Part Three is the moment itself, on a small bench midway along the Waikamoi rainforest trail, on our last full day:

"I remember getting to about the midpoint of the trail, finding a small bench, and sitting down on it. To get a better view, I stood up on it. And then it happened. Hawai'i seeped into my very being like being struck by lightning. Call it whatever you want. The Hawaiians call it mana - life force. It hit me like a freight train. I didn't know what had happened to me at the time. I just felt different. The serenity, the peace, the sense of wellbeing - so much more than I can describe in writing. I felt empowered with something. Something ancient, and raw."

I call it my new-life experience. I flew home on May 18, 2002, changed my major, changed my life, started collecting the plants of Hawai'i, and bought a domain to share my Maui photos. The photos became a site; the site became the work of my life. Everything on the career page traces back to that bench.

Why Hawai'i?

The question every first-timer asks, and the one I asked myself in 2002 before I'd ever flown in my life. Hawai'i is far, expensive, and Mexico is closer - so my 24-year answer covers what actually makes the islands different: the most isolated populated landmass on Earth, an ecosystem that exists nowhere else, an island chain you can watch being born and eroding at once. And then the part that matters:

"There's a kind of place that talks to you. Some people get that from the Rocky Mountains. Some get it from the New Mexico desert. Some get it from a Japanese garden in autumn. Hawai'i talks to most people who go - not all, but most. Twenty-four years of meeting other repeat visitors tells me that one. If you go and Hawai'i talks to you the way it talks to me, you'll know within forty-eight hours, and you'll spend the rest of your life finding reasons to come back."

45 Million of You

Somewhere along the way, our historical analytics crossed forty-five million people who have used HawaiiGuide to plan a trip - more people than live in California, and more than four and a half years' worth of every traveler who lands in the islands. The essay is a thank-you note I don't know how to make big enough, and an honest look at what the number actually was:

"It's somebody at 11 p.m. with fourteen browser tabs open, trying to decide between Maui and Kaua'i. It's a family in a rental-car lot checking whether the beach up the road has lifeguards. It's a honeymooner working out whether the Road to Hana fits in a day. It's tens of millions of small, unglamorous questions, answered at the exact moment somebody needed the answer. ... And the honest secret is that the number I care about most was never the forty-five million. It's one."