What does it take to move to Hawaii from Mainland, U.S.? Meet Kandy and Dave, who moved with one duffel bag, three suitcases and a car in 2021 to the Big Island of Hawaii after years in Santa Fe.
From Kansas to New Mexico...to Hawaii? Meet Kandy and Dave Shortle, originally from the great state of Kansas, who after retiring to Santa Fe, New Mexico--and enjoying high desert life for many years--sold their house during the pandemic and moved to Waikoloa, Hawaii, on the Big Island. How did they do it? Dave was full-time in the Army National Guard, and together he and Kandy raised a family and now have children and grandchildren who live in Silicon Valley, California. Moving from a house to a condo with a view of the ocean...moving to paradise...is a dream come true. Kandy and Dave have practical tips...and oh, yeah, how about moving that car?
Places mentioned in this episode:
Marysville, Kansas
Hays, Kansas
Manhattan, Kansas
Niagara Falls, New York
Corning, New York
Skidmore College
Cape Cod, Massachusetts
Santa Fe, New Mexico
Puerto Rico
Costa Rica
Waikoloa, Hawaii
The Big Island, Hawaii
Mauna Kea, Hawaii
Mauna Kea Golf Course, Hawaii
Honolulu, Hawaii
+++ Music by Eves Blue
To Hawaii with One Duffel Bag Three Suitcases and a Car
Christi: [00:00:00] Welcome to moving along today, our guests are Kandy and Dave Shortle who moved to Hawaii with one duffel bag, three suitcases and a car. We're going to explore what it takes to make such a big decision to move from mainland U.S. to Hawaii, which for many people is a dream.
Come true. Welcome Dave and Kandy
Kandy: Thanks,
Christi: Christi. My pleasure. Nice to have you here. Kandy and Dave, you both grew up in Marysville, Kansas. You met in the second grade with a slight diversion when Kandy moved to Corning New York, and then went to Skidmore College before returning to Kansas to finish college.
You've been happily married ever since with a family, children, and grandchildren who now live in the Silicon Valley and family still in Kansas. Along the way you had a brief foray to Connecticut [00:01:00] living there with friends for less than a year, but pretty much it's been Kansas. It was Kansas all the way.
Dave, you were full-time Army National Guard in Kansas where you guys lived for 20 years. And then when you retired, you moved to Santa Fe New Mexico, which is where I met you then during COVID in 2021, you decided to sell your home in Santa Fe and move to the Big Island of Hawaii to Waikoloa.
Where to be fair. You already owned a condo, which you bought on one of your earlier vacation adventures.
Let me ask you what did travel and moving mean to you as a kid growing up in Kansas, .
Kandy: Travel for me was exciting. I loved it every summer, my family and I it's just me and my mom and dad would go to a different city in the United States and stay there for about a week to 10 [00:02:00] days when my dad had a business trip.
And through that business, I got to see all the United States practically. It was just, it was really fun and I loved it. But that was my first experience. Traveling.
Christi: How old were you when you started
Kandy: I was probably nine and my dad was president of a hardware association.
And so we, we got to go. That's why we were traveling like that in the first place I went was Chicago. And that was just so exciting. We got to stay in the Waldorf Astoria in the presidential suite. That was fun.
Christi: You were nine years old when you first went to Chicago,
did you drive? Oh,
Kandy: no, no, that year we flew first time in an airplane, everybody all dressed up women in hats and gloves and being a little dress and my little Mary Jane shoes and it was a fancy.
Christi: Do you think that fostered wanderlust.
Kandy: I don't think that one trip did, but then going [00:03:00] someplace different every summer. I think that certainly did it. Wasn't like we always went back to the same cabin on a lake somewhere which is fine, but this just, I could see so many different parts of the country and know that there were so many different things out there.
Christi: Dave, what about you?
Dave: Oh, my dad was in the Air Force when I was young and we traveled around a bit. I mean, relocated, relocated. When his life ended, we went back to Marysville and when we would travel after that, it would be my brothers and my mother and my grandparents.
And we would head off west, say, With the semi destination, but we always deviated. So we'd be gone sometimes for a month and I've never lost that desire to travel that way.
Christi: Just pick up and go
Dave: pick up and go. Yeah. Like Yellowstone National Park was the destination, but we ended up on the Pacific coast of Oregon.
Christi: [00:04:00] Wow. That must have blown your mind. How old were you?
Dave: Oh, eight, eight or nine years old, maybe brothers younger. We had a Ford station wagon and everybody piled in there and away we went.
Christi: Did you camp along the way or did you stay in motels or how did that work?
Dave: Camp a night or two and then stay in a motel with all the rollaway beds.
Younger brothers and yeah, so we kind of split it up. Least gasoline was cheap in those days, but and that's not the only, we went to Minnesota, Wisconsin one year and ended up staying a month, camping on a lake. And the only time we stayed in a motel was when we were actually moving from there back to Marysville.
Christi: Did your dad die?
Dave: Oh yeah, he was a pilot in the Air Force and it was a peace time. Flight accident.
We lived in Niagara Falls, New York. He was stationed at the Air Force base there. I mean, [00:05:00] interceptor squadron and that Air Force base is now Air National Guard.
Christi: So you were pretty young when he died.
Dave: I was just a couple of months shorter than my fifth birthday.
Christi: Yes. So do you remember him?
Dave: Oh, yes, certainly.
Christi: And do you remember the moving around the relocation? Relocation, relocation?
Dave: Yeah. Earliest memory was being in Marysville while he was in Korea. And my youngest brother was he's a year and a half younger than me.
He was we, and then when he, I remember him getting back and then we moved to somewhere and Alabama. And then while he did something and, you know, TDY somewhere and then up to and we drove to New York. I remember legs of that drive. It's cloudy, but it's, I remember losing my cowboy hat out the window actually[00:06:00]
traumatic things are always,
Christi: And it's things like the cowboy hat that pegs the memory, right? To your, to the top of the, you know, those, those memories of being very young. I think some people, they don't even have memories before they're five years old or more older,
Dave: I think because of the movements that being in different places is what helps with
Kandy: that.
And I think a traumatic thing like losing your father at that young age might spur you to try to keep memories alive.
Christi: So you were in Niagara Falls, your dad dies, but then you have these amazing summertime adventures where you and your brothers and your mom and your grandparents go off on these adventures and you kind of see what's going to happen next.
You don't, there might be a destination in mind, but really [00:07:00] you just might do something different. Right,
Is that how you traveled with.
Dave: Well, it was last summer, although we had destinations we did a lot of deviation then and plan. We knew we wanted to go to Cape Cod and we knew we wanted to see you.
And then there were people on the West Coast, but in between we just went where we wanted. Yeah, I'm
Kandy: just fine. What, six weeks? What's it? About six weeks on the road.
Dave: Oh, no more like seven,
Kandy: seven or eight. It was a trip of a lifetime.
Christi: You decided to take a cross country continental tour, and you began at Cape Cod,
Kandy: right? We began in Santa
Christi: Fe and Santa Fe.
Kandy: Began at Santa Fe, we stopped to see family in Kansas. Then we stopped to see a sister of a good friend in Illinois.
Dave: That was Jeanette's sister.
Kandy: Oh yeah. We stopped to see Jeanette sister. And then we meandered around. We were in Pennsylvania [00:08:00] on the 4th of July. I have to see the fireworks and some small place there. And then went to Cape Cod to stay with our good friends and stayed with them for about two weeks. They had just built a new house and we're having a lot of landscaping put in.
So that was really exciting to see that. And then we came back across New York to your place and then it was pretty much that there was not a destination until Seattle.
Christi: That's great. You stopped in Corning. I remember that after you left us in Hudson. Sorry. We've
Kandy: stopped in Corning and stayed longer than we thought we were because we had so much fun.
Downtown had been revitalized after a flood in the seventies. And, and it was, we just had a great time and I could see all my old haunts and an old creek that I used to walk down to from our house and got to go there. And so Corning was great fun.
Christi: Kandy was at the first time you'd been back to Corning since you were a kid
Kandy: or no. [00:09:00] Well, I went back for a couple of high school reunions and then sorta, you know, how high school reunion was just sort die away didn't go any more for that. And because everybody looks so old, just not right. So then.
We traveled really north very much the north route across the United States. I mean, yeah. Drove along Lake Erie. And then at one point we could practically see Canada when we were up north in North Dakota. The smoke was terrible
Dave: from Duluth, Minnesota to Seattle. It was smoke.
Kandy: Yeah. It was all the wildfires.
You couldn't see more than a quarter mile at some points when you're driving.
Christi: These were the wildfires that were in Washington.
Dave: Well, and yeah, I am Minnesota. They were in Canada and North Dakota and then farther west, we got into Montana. They were in [00:10:00] Canada and
Kandy: Montana.
We didn't see flames. We just saw the aftermath, the smoke,
Christi: which we were pretty familiar with from being in Santa Fe ?
Kandy: Yeah,
Dave: exactly.
Christi: After 16 years in Santa Fe in the high desert, you decided to move to an island. But you'd been vacationing . Various island regions for at least the last 10 years.
What was the tipping point for you in deciding to move?
Dave: Oh, I think when we went there in February of 2020, that's when COVID was just starting, when we came here, we came here
and. Only intended to spend like three months here and then come back. And, well, we couldn't get flights out until August, September because of COVID. So we actually got Hawaii driver's [00:11:00] licenses and became the residents of the state. At that point, we'd been here long enough. And then a few brief months, you know, through the holidays in 2020 and the election, and then back to Hawaii in January of 2021.
And we just decided after that, that we just stay here.
Kandy: I think staying here longer during 2020, let us realize that we could live here. We've made a lot of friends here and we live in a condo call. And there's just some wonderful people that we've met and I just love them. And that was another thing that gave me that go ahead in my mind that I could live here because of the friendship side establish.
Christi: That's really nice. Sometimes it seems like it takes a lot of guts to move to a place where you don't know
Kandy: anyone. I agree. I totally agree. And although we've done it [00:12:00] several times and when my moved to Hayes, when you went to school it does take that and you need to feel pretty secure in your relationship with the person you're moving with because for a long time.
That's the only other person you'll really have until you get to meet some people.
Christi: Do you think that Hawaiians are friendly? Is that part of it that they're open?
Dave: Oh yes.
Christi: The Aloha spirit
Kandy: It just very casual, very connected to the earth and the island and their native past and a very easy going, just to a nice place to live.
Christi: You said you didn't have friends when you went to Santa Fe either. So you just kind of dove right in.
Dave: I've never worried about that. Kandy meets everybody and makes friends, so that's who I meet.[00:13:00]
Boy, it's easy with her around.
Christi: You have your forward guard there? Go back to this notion of a tipping point. Dave, I think at one point you said to, because of COVID and people moving out of cities that real estate, I mean, it's not just in Santa Fe, but all over the country, the real estate shot up.
And that, that was another motivating factor for you in deciding to sell the house.
Dave: Absolutely. We arrived in Hawaii in January of 2021. And I was thinking, gee, it sure would be nice to just stay here. And I got an email from a realtor in Santa Fe.
Bernadette Parnell, if she hadn't prodded me, I may not have done anything about it. So I called her. And she says, well, things are selling really well and the market's way up and blah, blah, blah. And so I said, okay. I had a doctor's appointment, the first part of may.
So I went back mid April and I [00:14:00] called her and she says, get it on the market now. So it was probably mid May before we could get everything ready and get it on the market. It's sold in five days and
Kandy: I was still still in Hawaii. So he and Bernadette did it all, that's the way to sell a house folks, send your partner ahead to do it all.
Christi: Do you think if you hadn't had the place in Hawaii, would you have been so willing to sell the place in Santa Fe?
Kandy: I'll say, I'll say no,
Dave: probably not. That would have been. A bigger logistical issue. You know, we already had a place to live here, so we didn't have to go look and, and the prices were way up here too.
We probably couldn't have afforded to get in, in this market the way it is now. So we're fortunate to be in it in here prices I'm almost doubled.
Kandy: Then I think that's something that I would tell [00:15:00] people if they're thinking of moving somewhere, go and rent a house, a condo of whatever for a month or two and get a feel for it.
We were able to do that here. And so we figured out finally, we could live here. I would want to live. And when we moved to Santa Fe, we'd been there over the years. So we knew what Santa Fe was, but just to pick a spot on a map and say, that's where I want to go. Now that would take some guts.
That's a little scary even to me.
Christi: Yeah. It's interesting because you guys travel around a lot and you always seem to be looking for islands and I remember you went to Costa Rica, didn't you go to Puerto Rico to, yeah, we
Kandy: did. We went to the little island of off of Puerto Rico.
Absolutely enchanted place. It was a great little place.
Christi: Nice. But so why Hawaii? And [00:16:00] not say the Caribbean or even Mexico, like those other friends of yours.
Dave: Yeah. I've never had a desire to go
Kandy: to Mexico. Dave doesn't want to live in Mexico. Okay, well,
Christi: that was easy. One. How did you settle on Hawaii
Kandy: because it was U.S., I think was a big part of it.
Dave: Yeah, it was part of the United States.
Christi: So it's Puerto Rico, right? My
Dave: medical benefits
Things were just iffy there and it's so much hotter in Puerto Rico than it is here. The climate here is not real hot and it never freezes like today of course it's winter or almost winter and today the high, it'll be low to mid eighties and the lows will be upper sixties.
And it's a
Kandy: paradise. Yeah.
Christi: Have you had a lot of visitors to paradise?
Kandy: A few I think that the trip [00:17:00] sort of scared, I don't want to say scares, but it just seems like it's such a long way. And it is and for a while, airfares were so high, but now this last few months, they've just plummeted trying to get people in, you know, trying to get tourism back up again.
But no,
Dave: we have a place to stay and be having to spend money for
Christi: lodging. That's right. I'll take that under advisement.
Kandy: I really thought more people would take us up on visiting. We do have friends from Santa Fe that would come in in January nice February. And so that'll be sort of fun.
It's just so much fun to show people around, but we've also learned that it's a small condo, what's about 1200 square feet, but you've also learned that if people stay more than a week or so, it's just might be a little too long. There's a point in winter for two weeks, two weeks. I don't know. But [00:18:00] so there's that, and it's a long, long ways to come, just if they're going to spend a week or so.
Christi: So do you send them off to the other islands to tour the state?
Dave: I would hope they'd want to do that. You know, Maui is congested Oahu is a big city Honolulu. Hawaii seems to be where everybody wants to go, but I love it here. The Big Island, they say it's laid back.
Kandy: It's very laid back and it's not nearly as developed as the other islands, which we found when we visited other places.
So that's why we liked it here. Another reason to come here fit our lifestyle better than, you know, a big city or just a congested little island
Christi: since moving there. Is there anything that's really surprised you once you became residents of Hawaii?
Dave: Oh, I don't think so. After being kind of trapped here during COVID and I can't say that's fair because we didn't really want to leave anyway, but I think we learned a lot of [00:19:00] lessons then. And a big thing was finding something to do other than tourism.
Christi: Talk to me about what you found.
Kandy: Well, I think that's also something people should consider. If they're thinking of moving to a paradise like this, you know, you're not going to spend every day on the beach.
In fact, I don't even go to the beach that often. I hate to admit it. We've got a beautiful pool here in our complex, and I can see the ocean, but I don't feel the need to go to the beach that frequently. But I think a lot of people just think it's a constant vacation, but after a while you needed something to occupy your time
maybe a part-time job I've done that. So I didn't want to do that anymore, but I do volunteer at a thrift shop three days a week, and I've met some wonderful people through that. Not to mention getting some great buys so that I think that's really important. What am I going to do? Ask yourself, what am I going to do there?
When the, the first blush of living in paradise sort of fades a little bit.
Dave: We [00:20:00] found a community garden in Waikoloa Village, and that is generated friendships. And and you can volunteer at the garden to do all kinds of things to help other than just your garden plot, that they help improve the whole place.
Christi: The other gardeners say Kandy You're pretty good at it too.
Dave: Yeah. Well, you know, it's interesting. The soil is all volcanic Ash base and some organic hubris from grasses that have decomposed and stuff.
We're on the dry side of the island. So the rainfall isn't common here, although we did have a nice rain and then trying to till lava rock to get the Ash up to the top, you have to amend it with stuff from Lowe's and home Depot. You know,
you plant green beans and they grow up in a big vine. And if the insects don't chomp 'em to pieces and they stay there for a year or two.
Kandy: There's no real growing seasons here as that are as different in [00:21:00] other parts of the country, it's nice all year round, although we're beginning to recognize the season that changes, but it's, I asked a woman who sort of manages the community garden one time.
I said, well, we should have like a harvest party thinking, you know, in the fall have a harvest party. And she looked at me like, why I'm harvest. That's not something we do at his particular time. It's just all year
Dave: we have an eggplant Bush that's three feet tall
Christi: wow. And so it just eggplants year round.
Dave: Yeah. Japanese and a conventional
Kandy: eggplants and where, and where I work at the, the Dusty Donkey is what it's called the. People who live here and have gardens and trees. And I swear at least twice a week, we get a big bag of avocados. Somebody brings them in or different citrus fruit. And we have papaya and it's pretty amazing.
People share all that stuff. I don't think we bought fruit. We did buy strawberries the other day, but [00:22:00] it's pretty incredible what you can harvest here.
Kandy: Well, I'll tell you about my several different times that we flew over here before we moved here. We rented the condo. It was a rental for the first two or three years that we owned it and we rented it. We rented it out. And then when we'd come here, we'd move in. We had a storage shed and we'd, move our stuff in, into the condo that we really didn't want to share with others and sort of make it home for a month or so when we were here, like in that respect, but eventually that got longer and longer.
And I can't tell you how I hated packing everything up and putting it back in storage and then getting out again things like better pots and pans and nicer dishes and our clothes that we didn't take to Santa Fe with us. That was just annoying to have to do all of that.
Another reason that it pushed us just to move here. So we didn't have to do that every time. But that might be [00:23:00] something that people could consider doing. If they're thinking about moving someplace and they have the funds a is buying a condo or something and then renting it out and then coming on, living in it for a few months out of the year, they can make some money on the condo and they can get a feel for what it's like to live here.
So that I think was that was fortuitous for us the way that happened.
Christi: Would you ever consider renting it and then like, say coming back or going to visit somebody else the flip side of it, now that you're there.
Dave: Well, you have to have a license to rent with. Now.
If friends would come and stay here, that would be fine. But if we. Took money for it. Then legally we'd have to have the license, which we did have, but we gave that up lowers our taxes a lot to give that up.
Kandy: Yeah. Getting residency and not having this as a rental property and being 70 years [00:24:00] old and being 70.
Yeah. All of that contributes to vastly lower property tax.
Christi: I was going to ask you about some of the big considerations people should think about, and one is expenses, right? You've told me the groceries are more expensive, but it sounds like you got free avocados. Hey,
Kandy: I know. How can you go wrong?
I love them dave's allergic. So I get all of them.
Christi: And he gets the eggplant. You get the avocados like that?
Kandy: Well we think from Santa Fe and you know what it was like there, well, you know what it's like where you are to The prices were high in Santa Fe, prices are a little bit higher here.
Availability, availability. We have friends, the friends of ours on Cape Cod questioned what they were doing, build a house on Cape Cod and bought a condo here. And they said that we're at the end of the supply chain on both ends, you know? So availability is limited many times
Christi: And that's not due to COVID, that's just the nature of the beast.
Kandy: It's the nature of the beast and the, yeah. The supply chain in the breakdown of that [00:25:00] recently.
Christi: And then let me ask you expenses. What about transportation? And why you decided to move your car and how you did it .
Kandy: Well, cars are much more expensive here and we really liked our Subaru and it was fairly new. And I think it costs about 1500 to put it on a boat and ship it from Oakland, California to here.
Dave: It was a lot cheaper to ship, a very sound and three-year-old car here. It was paid for. And rather than going to the expense of I don't know. We would've had to rent a car for a while to, to buy one. And then rental cars here right now, or out of sight expense.
Kandy: Yeah. There was such a shortage when COVID hit all the rental car agencies got rid of their car, they just took them off-Island. And so then when tourism started picking up again a little [00:26:00] bit, there were no rental cars. And it wasn't unusual to see like $400 a day, $500 a day for a rental car. Y yeah, so we rented for the first couple of years when we came here and we rented a car and we're just staying for a couple months and then we realized that's crazy.
So we first purchased a little Hyundai Drove that around. We have a parking spot associated with our condo. So we needed here when we went back to Santa Fe and we picked that up for real cheap and it allowed us to get around. And we've drove that around for like two years. I think when we came to visit, yeah.
Kept it in good shape. And then I sold it to one of the women who works on the landscaping crew here at our condo. I didn't even have to put a sign up because decent cars are in such demand. That word got out. And she came and knocked on my door and said she wanted to buy my car. And I said, fine.
Christi: Let me [00:27:00] ask you about the duffle bag and the three suitcases, because this has been the burning question and that is how did you decide what to take and what to sell or give away? Did you have help? Did you just like say, oh, we've done this before. This is easy or was it hard? What was the emotional
Dave: part of.
We had an estate sale at our house when we sold it. And the hardest part was figuring out then what goes and what stays and we came out on the house so well that we thought, why spend a fortune to ship stuff there when the items weren't worth, what it costs to ship it
Kandy: in particular, a lot of Dave's tools.
He did bring some with him. He couldn't part with hand tools, hand tools, no me, I was a collector from the get go, and I had over several hundred pieces of Stangl pottery that I [00:28:00] collected over decades. That was tough. And my mom, her mother passed down to her and then to me, a huge set of Haviland China that came from Germany.
And I really wanted to try to sell those things, before the estate sale, but that's a lot of work. Nobody wanted it. And well, if I've gone online and done my Stangl online, I could have, but shipping, nobody lives around the Santa Fe area that collects Stangl so getting everything ready to ship and doing all that.
And I just decided I'm done. I'm done with it. It took me a while to get there though. It wasn't a snap decision that, okay, I'm just going to sell everything. It was over many months that I realized I don't need that stuff. I loved it. I loved collecting it. Morgan and I would collect it when she was just, you know, in elementary school we'd go to flea markets and she'd point out something I'd missed and we'd feel so good that we found a piece of Stangl.
But [00:29:00] Yeah, that was over. And the other thing is to have a honest conversation with your kids or anyone who might inherit your things do they even want it? Morgan was really honest about what she wanted and what she didn't. She wanted a lot of artwork but not necessarily what she didn't want the Haviland for sure.
And she didn't want all the Stangl I'd already given her a complete set of that. And so that helped too.
Christi: So did you let the estate sale people handle it? You didn't go to eBay or you didn't go to collectors and try to sell the collection as a whole? Well, the Havilland as a set, right?
Dave: Right. We were so fortunate to get somebody to do the estate sale
Kandy: at a timely
Dave: manner.
Kandy: When you realize all the houses that are being sold? Well, a lot of them are having estate sales too. So to try to find an estate sale person who could put us into a schedule that wasn't three and four [00:30:00] months out, that was a shock.
We really lucked out. It turned out the woman was an alumni of Kansas state university. So we've had a little bond there, but that's something you don't even, I didn't even think about that, how hard it would be to get an estate sale schedule, but we let her sell it all. They just did everything.
And yeah, some of the things that I just treasure, I didn't read that we got a nice check in that paid for our cross-country tour.
Christi: That's nice. You would recommend say give it over to an estate sale professional and just let it be if you can .
Kandy: Otherwise you're going to just labor over every single piece, you'll pick up and try to price it. And I mean, that worked for
Dave: us. So a stable base you'd have to have a storage facility was just all too
Kandy: complicated for us.
It was fine. Some people might want to sell it all themselves. That just wasn't something I wanted to do. I don't regret it. I don't [00:31:00] think I've had one day that I think, oh my God, I wish I had all my, whatever. You know, a few little pieces that I think, oh, I wonder what happened to that too. But yeah, he misses his, some of his tools.
Christi: Yeah. I can imagine the tools. Those were always the things that went first at the garage sales in Santa Fe anyway,
Kandy: and we rely on Amazon.
Christi: Is there any other advice you would give for people considering moving to Hawaii from the mainland?
Dave: Well, selling our house was a big deal that got us out of that debt. So we have more money to deal with the prices here,
Kandy: but I would say, I miss snow. And Dave doesn't. So I've already told Morgan next year, we're coming to the mainland somewhere and I want to go someplace where there's pretty snow for Christmas.
I don't want to be in a long time. I don't want to snowshoe. I don't want to get cold. I just want to be able to look out my window, sit by a fire, look out my window and see [00:32:00] snow. So that's, that's just a little bit know that you can survive without having the change of seasons. That's something everyone asked us when we came here.
You think we'll like it without change of seasons. And I'm okay with that except the snow by Christmas.
Dave: I, I think I noticed the season change here, the end of November. It just cooled off in a week.
Kandy: We'll get the trade winds that come in and cool things off. And they're wonderful, but it's not just going to blow your house down and we do have snow on Mauna Kea we can see it when it snows. That's nice.
Christi: So are you going to drive up there to get your snow?
Kandy: Probably not. Probably not. There's a huge telescope up there. And it's a observatory and you have to get up there by appointment only up to the very top where the snow is. You can get to a visitors' center, but the last I knew there wasn't any snow there. So, and that's at what? The top is 14,000 [00:33:00] feet. So we can look out our window and see the top of the mountain with the snow, but not like it's on my front porch.
Dave: And your question was asking what people should consider when deciding to move here.
Kandy: Healthcare is something to think of. This island does not have an extensive healthcare system. If you need anything special, really specialized, you go to Honolulu.
Christi: That's a great point about healthcare. It sounds to me like you guys don't have any regrets.
Dave: No, no, I miss people. I miss some friends.
Christi: Yeah. We miss you too. It was nice to see you when you came through. That
Dave: was fun,
Christi: well, you guys, this has been so great. Thank you. Is there anything else you want to tell me?
Dave: Golf courses here are magnificent.
Christi: I bet. For a lot of people that is a big draw.
Dave: I'm looking at the 14th fairway right out my back door here.
Christi: You ever have any balls [00:34:00] come your way?
Kandy: Every once in a while? Only a few in the last four years or so, I'd say depending on where you are from the tee box, some people have it more frequently than others.
Thank God.
Dave: I got to play at Mauna Kea Golf Course last weekend. That was kind of the primo course on the island. Occasionally hosts the Hawaiian Open a PGA event. So that was rather fortunate. The green fees are so high, but a friend of a friend gave a friend four free passes. So we had a great, great afternoon.
Kandy: A lot of people come here for the golf. Definitely.
Dave: A lot of Japanese tourists come here for the golf.
Kandy: Yeah. We just opened up to Japan not long ago. It was cut off for a while because of COVID but now that's opened up.
You really should, come and visit. I realize you had family that you visited this time when you were on the West Coast, but you really should check fares and you know Hawaiian Air, I don't know what [00:35:00] flies out of.
Well, everything flies out of New York,
Christi: yes, we will. We will.
Kandy: Yeah. The trick is not to come over spring break. When all the kids in the college kids are around or really over the holidays. Cause that's, it's always really crowded, but there's slower months like March anyway. Yeah.
Dave: November.
Kandy: Yeah, those are nice.
Christi: Yeah. Okay. Well that's good advice too. Actually, if you want to come to visit and think about moving here avoid spring break,
Dave: the peak season here is January, February, March, and April. The prices go back down at the golf course. So in peak season they raised their prices, they go down the 1st
Kandy: of April.
Christi: You guys are so nice to see you. Love you too. Bye.