I should never have mentioned cockroaches.

Last night, I took my book to bed.  Robin was out in the living room, watching the Federer-Tsonga tennis match. I saw movement out of the corner of my eye. Something was running along the top of the wall over the open balcony door. Like a good wife, I yelled "ROBIN!" He came running. "WHAT IS THAT?"  He had no idea, but he chased it down and after a few comical moments, he killed the beast. It looked sort of like a cockroach, but it was nearly two inches long. I remember that the ones in Mexico were over an inch long and they were fat. This one wasn't fat, just big. "I didn't know cockroaches could fly," Robin said as he finally squashed the bug. So maybe it wasn't a cockroach. I don't know. Whatever it was, it was big, and it was running around on my hotel room wall, and I was not happy. Maybe that's why I'm so tired today - a night of standing guard, even in my sleep, against the invading hordes.

We tried again today to find Green Sands Beach. Did I tell you about that? We tried the other day to find it. It is on our map, but there are no directions for actually getting there. The last time we tried, we ended up at South Point, ostensibly the southernmost point in the United States. We drove down a twisty road off Highway 11, pulling off several times to let other cars go by in clouds of dust the colour of curry powder. We parked at the end of the road and set off walking along deep ruts in the curry powder. We found a little beach, but it wasn't green. A local man who was there with his family told me that we should have kept going down the highway a little farther, then taken a road that led to the gate, and from there it would be a two-mile walk to Green Sands. It was midday, and we didn't feel up to hiking in the heat, so we settled in at the little beach for a while, then made our way home. As we drove, it started to rain, which was just wonderful. We got out of the car at Safeway to pick up something for dinner, and it was like stepping into a steam bath.

Yesterday, we went north instead, found a very pretty beach at a resort, another one at the big ocean thermal energy conversion plant at Keahole Point. I had fun there, playing in the tide pools and trying to catch a photo of the waves at their peak.

Today, we tried again to find Green Sands Beach. We couldn't find the second road my informant had mentioned, and everyone else we asked told us to go down to the end of the South Point road and take a left - but that's what we had already done. Just now, I went hunting for a website about Green Sands, and I found one that says " To get to this beach, one must either use a four wheel drive or hike six miles from South Point, Ka Lae, the southern most tip of the United States." SIX miles. Whoa. I'm glad we didn't attempt that. A twelve-mile hike in that heat would have done us both in.

And today, when we came home, it rained again. It's an awesome responsibility, being the ones who have to trek to the south end of the island and bring the rain back.