I slept in later than I like, but I've been doing that with the cold anyway. It's almost gone, I hope. Hubby and I had coffee, then goofed off on separate computers for a while. Thank heavens for wireless.

And then we got hungry. I don't know why, but the whole breakfast thing seems to escape us on weekends. We drove down to the Ward Center with the intention of going to D&B's. Not local, but hey. Except they had a twenty minute wait.

“Let's go downstairs,” says Mike.

“Buca's had a line too.”

So we end up going to Wolfgang Puck Express. Not bad at all. After that, a trip to Borders was in order. I bought Prince Joe by Suzanne Brockmann, The Master by Colm Toibin, Lolita by Nabokov, and The Egyptologist by Arthur Phillips. As if I don't have enough to read.

As we were leaving Borders, I pointed toward Manoa and said, “Look at those houses way up there on the mountain. Where's the road up?”

“Let's find out.”

“Okay.”

We found it pretty easily. Go to Makiki and head for Round Top. Takes you up, up, up, twisting and turning until you are high above Honolulu. The place where we stopped isn't even the top, but there is a lookout point.

A couple of small tour groups came up while we were there. One group was British, another Japanese. “Oooh, aaahhhh,” they said. “Ooooh, wow.”

As we drove down the other side of the mountain, I was in a panic. Every now and then, when we went around a hairpin turn, the setting sun glared off the windshield in such a way that you were absolutely friggin blind.

Great big ropey vines grew down the sides of the mountain, hugging the trees and shading most of the road (thank God). And at the top, I forgot to say, bamboo grows wild. There are actually houses up there, some 2000 feet above Honolulu. They have great big steep driveways, either up or down from the road. Good thing it doesn't ever snow or get icy here.

We finally made it home and then promptly went back out again. Mike was hungry again and I didn't feel like cooking. We drove to Pearl Harbor and ate at a dive. On the way home again, we stopped and picked up a bottle of champagne. I don't know why, but I have a serious hankering for it tonight. I'm usually a red wine gal. I suppose I feel the need to celebrate making it down that mountain in one piece.