Richard and June have left the premises. They are accompanying grandson Kapono Pa (that’s Kimo and Tracy’s son) to New York City. I’ll let Kapono tell you what he’s going to be doing there.

Kapono writes:
I am 16 years old and this coming year I will be a junior at Kamehameha Schools Hawaii Campus. The thing that I am going to is a sort of leadership conference where I will be mainly looking at the aspects of Global Business and Entrepreneurship. I was invited by the people at LeadAmerica last year.

I was able to choose from a variety of things to study such as Medical Studies, Crime Scene Investigation, etc. that were to take place at a variety of cities across the U.S. (my conference just so happened to take place in New York).

For the next 10 days I will be with other kids from around the U.S. (possibly the world) learning about global business and entrepreneurship. I think we will be creating a “mock” business plan and going through a sort of fast-forward simulation of how it all works and what happens. We will also have field trips to various locations in the city such as the financial district (NYMX, World Trade Center, Wall Street, Museum of Finance, etc.) Liberty Island and The Statue of Liberty, and Sony Wonder Tech Laboratory. We will also listen to some key speakers and learn from their experiences. That’s the gist of it.

Leslie interjects: Sounds like a chip off the old block, doesn’t he?

And then Richard picks up the story: What are the chances of spotting a Hamakua Springs bumper sticker on a seat at George Bush International Airport in Houston as we’re changing planes? Could it be George Herbert’s son, George W., is thinking of visiting us to go mountain bike riding?

We took a New York City, double-decker open-air bus tour, getting the lay of the land. We had to occasionally duck branches and low-hanging traffic lights. The weather is beautiful–in the high 70s. The city is cleaner than we had imagined.

The three of us spent five hours, on and off the bus, cruising the city. We walked around a block in Greenwich Village on Bleeker Steet. No wonder that street name sounded so familiar to us–that’s where the New York office of the Rainforest Alliance is located. In 1993, they awarded our farm the first “ECO O.K.” certification in the world.

We knew this was going to be a different experience when we found ourselves in a 150-foot line waiting for a cab. The cab driver turned out to be an easygoing person from Bangladesh. He talked about immigrants and how they manage to survive in the city, all while he was jockeying for space against the other traffic. He and a van dueled at low speeds to get ahead of each other for about a hundred yards. Finally the van got a nose in front and cut him off. It seemed to me that our driver gave in good-naturedly.

But a short while later he spotted an opening, because of a break in the off-street parking, and shot in front and regained the lead for good. All this was going on while he was carrying on this easy conversation. Highly entertaining. If you watch carefully, it is going on all the time by bicyclists, pedestrians, even elevator riders.

It’s not easy to maintain the Hilo pace here. But we’re trying.

We ate dinner at a five-story Appleby up the street. The food is generally pretty good and plentiful. I’ll have to do 50 minutes at the fitness center and hope for the best. I hope their scale measures to the 10ths.

As they say, it’s “the city that doesn’t sleep.” At 8:00 at night, the line at Starbucks was longer than at 8 in the morning. At midnight on a Tuesday, Times Square is packed as much as at 5:00 p.m. pau hana (after work).

Kapono’s conference starts tomorrow and we’ll drop him off at Fordham, which is close to the Bronx Zoo. The conference finishes on the 25th. We’ll just have to keep ourselves occupied.

Here’s Kapono and June at Times Square: