Last year, we bought a set of 12 Hollywood Video rental coupons on eBay — one rental per month for about $1.50 apiece. While some games were better than others, we really enjoyed being able to go out and get a new Wii game every month without breaking the bank. I kept meaning to write about the games that we got, but never got around to it.

So we were on the lookout for the same coupons when 2010 rolled around, and we found a 36-pack online — 3 sets of 12 each. We kept one for ourselves and sold the other two for a tidy profit. (Our price for each rental this year — $0.00!) And I decided that I am going to document each rental — a year of Nintendo Wii fun.

First up for 2010: New Super Mario Bros. The game has gotten great reviews, and even won several awards for best game of the year 2009, so I was looking forward to it. We got it while Sarah’s sisters were staying with us for the holidays, and I wanted to try out some of the cool multi-player stuff that’s new in this latest edition of the classic Mario series.

I liked playing the game, and I didn’t find it too difficult, having beaten Super Mario World on the Super Nintendo back in the day. But none of the other people at our house who were trying to play the game had much experience with the Mario franchise, so they didn’t know how to run and jump high, for example. They didn’t enjoy it very much and kept dying. Multi-player with these guys was a joke. Read the rest of this entry »

We started the day in our condo in Kapaa, Kauai. We got out the door right on time and to the airport to return our rental car. Our flight to Honolulu was on Hawaiian Airlines, and it was better than Go! Airlines in every way. Free checked bags for each of the four of us, an on-time take-off, and juice on the flight. We were very happy with Hawaiian, and we swore that we’d never fly Go! again.

We picked up our new rental car at Enterprise. It was a gold Ford Fusion, and all of the controls felt cheap and plasticy — remind me again not to buy a Ford. (I was impressed, however, with the Dodge Magnum that we drove all week on Kauai. Everything seemed to be in the right place and well-designed.) Read the rest of this entry »

Today we hit the north side of the island. We started at the Kilauea lighthouse, which was a really cool scenic outlook and wildlife refuge. We saw a few seabirds, but the place wasn’t officially open until 10:00 am, so we weren’t able to go inside.

We went to the beach at ‘Anini. (It used to be Wanini, but the “W” on the sign fell off years ago, and people just started calling Anini instead. Funny, huh?) We climbed in a big tree and looked at the water for a few minutes, then we were back in the car. Read the rest of this entry »

Today we started off at the Lihue airport for a plane tour of the island. It lasted about an hour and we saw pretty much the whole island. But we were pretty high up in the air, and we weren’t as impressed with the tour as we thought we would be.

We hit Walmart for some food and found a Hawaiian shirt for me there too. After that we came home for some lunch and a nap. We rented a tandem bike and the Welches rode it up to the beach and we all spent the afternoon boogy-boarding on a beach just north of us. We rode the bike home and Sarah went to the Farmers’ Market and got some fruit and bought a nice fruit-and-veggie smoothie. Doesn’t seem like much of a day — pretty low-key, but we had a good time today.

Today started with a timeshare pitch at Shell Vacation Club just down the road. The saleswoman didn’t appreciate having gotten the two young couples who definitely weren’t going to buy a timeshare today. She was pretty condescending to us, but we got out of there unscathed and with a $100 discount per couple for our airplane flight tomorrow.

After that, we rented a couple of double kayaks and went up the Waimea River. Going upstream for two miles took longer than we thought it would, and the hike to Secret Falls was nice, but longer than we thought. It reminded me of all those scenes on Lost where they’re hiking through the jungles. I was the only one who was wearing decent footwear — everyone else just had flip-flops. Brad even got a nasty-looking cut on his foot.

We got to the falls and ate our PB&J lunch (Sarah had a couple of McDonald’s salads instead), then went for a dip in the pool below the waterfall. It was refreshing but not too cold, and the water was just pounding on us. Sarah said it felt like a hurricane. We had a good time, and it wasn’t until after we got out that we heard a tour guide tell his group not to go directly under the main flow of the waterfall, because a rock or log or fish could fall on your head.

We got a little lost on the hike back to the kayaks, but eventually we found our way back down the river. We met a Hawaiian guy on a surfboard who was paddling downstream with us, and we asked him about the best places to go out to dinner. He also let me and Brad each take a spin on his board when we got back down to the dock.

We didn’t take his advice when it came to dinner, but I wish we had. Instead, we walked up to a place called Olympic Cafe that was recommended by some people we met in the hot tub. (A long soak was absolutely necessary after our hike and paddle.) The food wasn’t great, and the prices weren’t either, but it was close enough to walk. After the food, we walked over to the ABC Store across the street to look for souvenirs. We were checking out calendars when Brad turned over one called “Women of Hawaii.” It turned out to be topless women, quite a sight for Brad and Debbie, which led to this quotable line from our walk on the way home.

Brad: Remember when we saw 24 boobs?

On that note, I’m going to bed.

Yesterday was a full day of fun! We started at the highly-recommended Poipu Beach on the south side of the island. We started out with snorkels, but ours didn’t work very well, so we ended up just resting and sunning in the sand. After a couple of hours of hanging out and smelling cigarette smoke from other people on the beach, we grabbed lunch at a place called Bubba’s Burgers nearby. We were hoping for some great burgers, but what we got was just same-old same-old.

After lunch, we hit another beach called Shipwreck Beach near the Hyatt resort. The waves were pretty rough — not good for swimming or snorkeling, but we got out our rented boogy boards and had a blast riding the waves into the shore for the next hour. Debbie kept getting knocked over by the waves, but we all had fun. We came back to the condo and soaked in the hot tub for a while, but my neck is still stiff from our first round of beach fun.

Last night, we went to a luau at the Smith Family farm. It was a great meal and a pretty good show for a really high price, but we were really tired. We were ready to come home halfway through the show, but then we would have missed a pretty cool fire-knife demonstration. We collapsed into bed, dead tired and full of sun.

Today, we had an early morning — we had to leave our condo in Kapaa by 6:00 to be at the marina in Port Allen for a boat tour. Captain Andy’s was supposed to take us up to the Na Pali coast on the northwest side of the island, but Kauai is having extremely high surf right now, including 40- to 50-foot swells. That meant that we couldn’t go north, we had to go east past some of the places that we’d already visited in person.

We spotted a big group of dolphins that were breaching and even saw a couple of them jump. They had us get out into the water (in better snorkel gear) and we saw neat fish and a turtle. I was able to touch the turtle on the back. They fed us a pretty good breakfast and lunch, but we thought that we should have gotten a discount because we weren’t drinking their beers like everyone else was. Overall, it was a good tour with a good crew — but I wish that we could have seen the 4000-foot cliffs of Na Pali.

After our tour, we drove up the Waimea Canyon. It was just a nice drive up to see a pretty lookout over a really big canyon. Afterward, we got shave ice at the best-rated place on the island, called JoJo’s. We considered it a birthday present for Debbie, since she turned 30 today.

This morning, the resort held what they called an orientation for new guests, but seemed to us more like a meat market for companies to come in and pitch their services. They held a raffle for each company, and Debbie won a 5-hour boat trip that we were already interested in anyway, so we decided to all go and split the cost of the three tickets. We also decided to do a plane tour of the island (rather than the touted helicopter tours that are $80 more per person) and get $100 off per couple by going to a timeshare pitch.

We went to a Christmas craft fair this morning near the Spouting Horn blowhole near Poipu, which was further away than we thought it would be. Sarah got some earrings and Debbie found some trinkets, and we were less than impressed with the blowhole.

We got back to our condo and over to the church (right across the street from the Pono Kai) in time for the first testimonies in Fast and Testimony Meeting, but not in time for the sacrament. The testimonies were very impressive — much less irrelevant crap than you’d hear in a testimony in our ward, and more meaningful expressions of love for the gospel and for family.

We were glad that we went to church, but we didn’t stay for the other two hours. Instead, we came home and had a nap. (We were really tired after a 23-hour day yesterday.) This afternoon, we finalized our plans for the week and played shuffleboard. The Gibbys beat the Welches — 103 to 98.

My customer service experience with Go Airlines yesterday was terrible. They were providing our flight from Honolulu to Lihue last night, and our flight was supposed to take off from HNL at 5:45 p.m. When we first checked in with the front desk at about 5:00, they said the flight was delayed until about 6:00. We were okay with that, since we’d been rushing to make it there from our Denver-to-Honolulu flight.

We got into the terminal and waited and waited and waited. The computer screen was never updated to tell us anything except that the flight was delayed. When I asked the customer-service person in the terminal what the reason for the delay was, she got really snotty with me and said she was busy with something else (which she wasn’t), but that there was a maintenance problem. She didn’t have any information about when we’d leave. Other flights on the same airline were going in and out from the same terminal, but there was nothing on the Lihue flight.

At about 7:30, the inept customer-service worker announced over the PA that they were happy to announce boarding for flight 1006 to Lihue. We looked out the windows and didn’t see any airplane, unlike the other flights that had come and gone in the last two hours. Regardless, we picked up our stuff and started congregating around the door that she’d announced. Nothing happened, and after a few minutes, we were among the first people to sit back down and wait. Psych! She got us good!

Eventually, they announced another flight that did take us to Kauai. It lifted off at 8:45 p.m. — a full three hours later than it was supposed to, for a 25-minute flight. The flight crew told us there had been a maintenance problem, then one of their crew members had gotten off and they had to call someone else in on their day off to cover for him. These people were apologetic, better than the ground crew girls, but they didn’t offer us anything to make things right.

I’m going to call the airline to complain tomorrow, but given the fact that we only paid $50 per seat, I don’t see that they’ll be able to do much. (Maybe they’ll refund the $10.00 per suitcase that we paid for our checked luggage — what a ripoff!) My problem wasn’t just that something was wrong with the plane, which could happen to any airline, but the failure of the people on the front lines. They were uncommunicative unless someone specifically asked them what was happening, and they gave bad information more often than not when someone did ask them.

It’s been a long day. We got up at 5:30 MST in our home in American Fork, Utah. We got out the door by 6:30 and to the SLC airport by 7:30. We got through security and our flight to Denver passed without excitement. We grabbed some lunch at an overpriced wrap place in the Denver concourse and headed to the next plane.

The flight between Denver and Honolulu was the longest of my life, literally. Seven and a half hours in one airline seat. We had two movies and various TV shows to watch (“It Might Get Loud” was a documentary that I’d been meaning to check out anyway, and “Elf” is always fun), but it felt like forever. My legs were so tired of sitting.

We got to Honolulu thinking that we’d have only 45 minutes to get our luggage and get to our next flight to Lihue. Fortunately, it only took us a couple of minutes to grab the bags and get to a shuttle that took us right where we needed to go. Unfortunately, our flight to Lihue has been delayed by an hour and a half, so we’ve got a lot of time to kill. Right now, Sarah is perusing brochures for touristy things to do in Lihue (my little planner!) and I’m writing.

It’s now almost 9:00 Utah time (I think), but before we get to go to bed, we’ve got to take another flight, pick up our luggage, get our rental car, check in at our resort, then find someplace to buy groceries. The weather here is nice and warm and humid, and what I’ve seen so far of Hawaii (the outside of the airport) was nice.

Today is a big day for me and my family.   Today I start my new job with E-Harbor — doing PHP programming for an e-commerce company.   A little bit different from what I have been doing at RM Plus, but not too much of a change.

My other exciting news is that I’m starting a new small business, and not surprisingly, it involves the Internet.   It’s a personalized Concentration-style matching game called MatchTheMemory.com.   You upload your photos to the site, and then build the cards from those images and any descriptive text you want to add.   Then when someone comes along to play the game, you have extra little surprises that pop up when they get a match or finish the game.   That could be a different photo, it could be a longer description of what’s going on in the picture, or it could be a YouTube video.

The best way to see what I’m talking about is to actually play the sample game (which is also the reason I wrote this in the first place, as a substitute for my family’s standard Christmas card) or one of my other featured games.   Then go create your own game.

The “small business” side of MatchTheMemory.com is selling printable versions of the games.   A PDF download that you can print on your home computer costs just $3.95, while a professionally-printed version starts at $19.95.   I think these would be a very fun custom Christmas gift.

I really want people to play my games, to create their own games, and to share them with others.   I explain more about why and how I built the site, and how you can interact with it, on the About page of MatchTheMemory.com.   Please go check it out!