Why here??

[Bullwinkle]

hate to burst your bubble - some may see ITO as a forward air base or pacific staging area.... those 4 engine aircraft doing touch and goes....... with all the funny do dads sticking out all over

submarine hunters looking for?

rest assured its on some ones target list

[Carey]

Sputnut, if that was mid-May of '89, I remember it VERY well, Best friend was getting married in NW Indiana, OUTSIDE in the late afternoon. The morning was FABULOUS, sunny & 50's - short sleeve weather, by 3pm flurries were starting, by 4pm "lake effect" was pumping up & we were scrambling to try to get a location that would not freeze all of the guests that were going to arrive within an hour.... the most amazing thing is a 20 deg drop was no where near any of the Chicago record temp. changes, there was one when I was a that was over 20 degree drop in minutes!

Yet we stayed on to experience another another couple of decades of that weather...(kinda tells you what nuts we are to live there!

[HereOnThePrimalEdge]

quote:

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Originally posted by Bullwinkle

hate to burst your bubble - some may see ITO as a forward air base or pacific staging area.... those 4 engine aircraft doing touch and goes.......rest assured its on some ones target list

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Those flights are mostly training missions from Hickam for pilots trying to get their hours in. The reason they sometimes don't even touch their tires to the runway? Extra wear on the treads & they're expensive. My brother-in-law was in the air force and described in detail what the military flights he saw here entailed. Some from the airport, some while looking out that big window at Ken's Pancakes as the 4 engine military cargo planes swooped over.

You're right about Hilo International as a possible staging area or forward base. If anything ever happened to Hickam, ITO has the runway to be the backup for the air force. Think the main runway is over 13,000 feet long. Remember the giant plane that landed at the wrong airport in Wichita last week? Even that plane only needs a 9000 foot runway to takeoff and land.

[VancouverIslander]

We bought a house in Puna because:
* It's warm in the Winter. The water is warm all the time.
* There are lots of recreation opportunities. Trails, beaches, volcano, 14,000 ft of vertical, cycling, fishing, surf, wheee.
* It was the bottom of a real estate market and a good opportunity.
* In a few years we can retire part time in the Tropics and if we get tired of it should be able to sell at a nice profit that can be used to fun other retirement activities. In the mean time we can rent it out.

[dayna]

I'd never been here. Hubby got some training on Oahu and I decided to go with him. I was not impressed with the city, but I felt "something".

We then made a trip to the Big Island after doing a bit of reading, joining Puna Web, etc. I stepped off the plane in Kona and again, was not that impressed. As soon as we got over to the East Side, I knew. I KNEW. I was home. Having moved all over the country as a child growing up with a military father I had never ever had this feeling before in my life.

We decided then that we would make Puna our home, someday, somehow. The someday and somehow happened a LOT sooner than we planned. I've never been happier. I used to sleep hours and hours. Unhappy. Now I wake up full of JOY, ready to milk my goat, tend my property, do puttering stuff.

I was talking to a local guy the other day, he was asking me how I felt about Hawaii. I almost got teary eyed. I can't explain it. Its not really paradise, that doesn't really exist. But what Puna is to me? It's home. I'll die here. He explained that he felt the same way and he was glad I lived here now. He said if everyone felt this way there would be a whole lot more happy people living here.

Dayna

http://www.FarmingAloha.com
www.E-Z-Caps.com

[Kelena]

I never, ever, ever wanted to go to Hawaii because I lived in California where there are great beaches and plenty of tourists. I couldn't figure out why anyone would want to come here. But a friend made me go. Boom. I fell in love with Hawaii before we even landed in Honolulu for the first time. I was on Hawaiian Airlines and then they made you close the window shades until they were preparing for landing. And then they ask you to open them. I looked out the window and there was Oahu. I gasped. I took one look, turned to my partner and said "I want to live here!". He shrugged and said something like "meh".

At first I looked on other islands but prices were very high for very little. Puna had the cheapest real estate. And when I first visited, I fell in love with the jungley, end-of-the-world feel of it. And the fact that there was a volcano that occasionally belched sulfur under the first vacation rental I stayed in appealed to the......oh what shall I call it? --the clinically insane aspect of my personality. After some hits and misses, I happened upon a small, but beautiful home -- a damsel in distress as it were. I love damsels in distress. We bought it.

Getting here was a titanic journey. The ship tipped up, broke in half and Leonardo diCaprio sunk to the bottom of the sea. I might have shoved him after hog-tying him and inserting a sock in his mouth. Who can remember how these things go down with all the screaming and shouting and the drowning orchestras and all? So hard to concentrate! In any case, I sometimes shuffle over to the cliff, try not to fall, and I drop plumeria blossoms on the ocean. The tradewind usually blows these right back up and they lodge in my hair. I play an Irish pennywhistle while I do this to enhance the effect. I'm so tired of the ukulele I could scream!

If anybody asks, I haven't seen the Heart of the Ocean pendant.

In the meantime, I look around me and, for better or for worse, I realize I fit right in.

[Lin W]

I'm here because I got my bluff called. I was looking to move out of SoCal and whining to a friend that if I just had the money I'd move to Hawaii but until my house sold, I was stuck, couldn't do a thing. He said he'd loan me the money and I could pay back later. I'd never been to Hawaii, had not a clue what I was doing but, after a few false starts, I put an offer on this house sight-unseen, over the internet, and it was accepted. That started the clock on six months of putting the animals through quarantine, weeding out my stuff, aloha garage sales, booking movers and shipping my truck - y'all know the drill. I arrived here exhausted with just a suitcase and a cat (dogs were waiting at BarKing). My life was in a metal box on a freighter somewhere out in the Pacific. My SoCal house fell out of escrow three times before a sale finally took. Stress! Things improved after my container and truck arrived, but for the first three months I was miserable, thought I'd made the worst mistake of my life. Then something just clicked and I realized I was quite enjoying it here. That was going on 10 years ago now and I'm still happy as if I had good sense, this is home and always will be. I wouldn't recommend my method, but the result worked well for me - best impulse buy I ever made!




I am so much more like I am today than I ever was before!

[Aaron]

It's simply the best place in the world to grow things, and I include my future family in that statement. And, I'm an avid gardener.

Living on the side of creation.

[peteadams]

We came to the Big Island for its agricultural attraction. With our California blinders on, we started the nursery on Maui and built a really nice house. But the subdivision turned out to be really inappropriate in spite of its ag zoning (how naive we were) so very soon we knew we needed to move on. But the price of Maui land was ridiculous and so obviously oriented toward the really, really well-to-do, that we finally gave up after a year of hunting and then waiting for a big hui of relatives to sign a land contract. One said no, holding out for more money.

The Big Island was Plan B. The more we realized how the infrastructure and resources on the East side here are so much more oriented to the agricultural community, far more than Maui, the more obvious it became that Puna was the best choice for the nursery for a variety of reasons, including local agricultural orientation and resources, land cost, access (at it’s worst, Hwy 130 is far better than Hana Highway!) and, not the least, climate suitability for our specialty crop. So we made a one week blitz into Puna to look for land, obsessively reading the MLS listings. We got a buyer’s realtor to help with the paperwork and he did most of a day driving us around to various listings, which was helpful as an introduction. Finally, after a couple of days, we noticed a new listing in the MLS, drove out to it and made a quick determination that this property was great for our purposes. Even though it was nearly entirely jungle (tall grass, regular guava and waiawi, tons of tibouchina) and off grid, we were up to the challenge: build a house, greenhouse and watering system, develop a plant collection, clear most of the grounds of jungle by hand and build garden beds and work with the larger community of agricultural professionals and gardening enthusiasts. And all that has been done. So we’re pretty happy.

[macuu222]

Retirement after 31 years in Fairbanks Alaska. Bought the land back in the 80's when acres were 5 grand. Then planted fruit trees and eventually had our house built while working in Alaska....knowing that we would retire here...