Today’s newsletter was really an excuse to tell you about my vacation (and mess around with recall):

I’m adding the Windward Coast and North Shore of Oahu to my list of magical happy-making drives along the Pacific Ocean. Green mountains, palm trees, sunny beaches, swimming with sea turtles and dolphins, poke bowls, plate lunches, cold coconuts, shaved ice, McDonald’s drive-thrus that still do fried pies, lizards, mongooses, peacocks, horses, feral chickens, Banyan trees, ukulele shops, and watching every sunrise and every sunset. It was the best vacation we’ve ever been on.

I feel about Hawaii the way Mark Twain did:

No alien land in all the world has any deep, strong charm for me but that one; no other land could so longingly and so beseechingly haunt me, sleeping and waking, through half a lifetime, as that one has done. Other things leave me, but it abides; other things change, but it remains the same. For me its balmy airs are always blowing, its summer seas flashing in the sun, the pulsing of its surfbeat is in my ear; I can see its garlanded crags, its leaping cascades, its plumy palms drowsing by the shore, its remote summits floating like islands above the cloudrack; I can feel the spirit of its woodland solitudes; I can hear the plash of its brooks; in my nostrils still lives the breath of flowers that perished twenty years ago.

Read all about “The North Shore.”