So the hike. This was... talk about ending with a bang! My group was comprised of Sonja, Sophia, Olivia, Dante, and Thomas. It all started out pretty flat and doable with some rough patches of broken dead coral and trash. Eventually it got to a point where I felt like I could walk a little faster with Kona (probably not the best idea as you'll as the story unfolds). Even though I was walking faster I would still wait and make sure that they would catch up or be within eyesight of me. Eventually I struck out further but wasn't worried because I was confident that Kona knew exactly where she was going. The hike turned out to be the opposite of flat. The normal hike is very steep and full of roots, this was a hike full of scrabbling up rock faces and at one point trudging up what was a seemingly random and unending set of stairs that appeared out of nowhere. At this point I had not seen Sonja and the rest of the crew for a while but I was not worried about it because they had Dante and I had Kona, both of which knew the island better than the back of their hand/paw. The island has only about 6 residences that are at shore level and I am pretty sure that I walked across the front of every single one of their properties. At one point I was wandering aimlessly along the beach in front of a house and a couple of guys stopped me and asked if they could take me back to where I needed to be by boat if I was lost. I told them I was okay and that I wanted to be in front of the group if they needed me. They shrugged and pointed me to a makeshift ladder that led straight up some massive rocks that hung out over the white caps that lay below. I was shocked when Kona bounded forward and was up 4/5 of the rungs before I could blink! And just like that I was off again and soon recognized the terrain and there was the cabin that Professor Gilchrist was staying in. When I walked in the door dripping in sweat there were some pretty shocked looks. As it turns out I had made the entire trek with Kona in about 45 minutes, 15 minutes shy of the other crew that had gone the short way back. Adam and I buckled down on creating and practicing our presentation that we were giving on the Christmas tree worms that night. Soon Dante and crew came trudging down the path but I soon realized that Olivia was not with them. "What do you mean you don't know where she is??" I asked panicking slightly. "She said that she was going to try and catch up with you despite our advice to stay with us." Adam and I were kind of annoyed by the fact that no one else was troubled at all about Olivia being missing. We decided that we would give her 15 minutes and if she didn't show up we would go and look for her ourselves. The 15 minutes passed and Thomas, Adam, and I set off with the TBR phone and my filled water bottle. As we trekked back trying to retrace my footsteps worse and worse images kept popping into my head of Olivia falling or being passed out on a rock or something terrible. Adam tried to cheer me up by saying that she would probably brush it off, be fine, and would tell us that we shouldn't have gone to look for her.
After a good 40 minutes we got a call from Brian telling us to turn around and that Olivia was back. We immediately around and made it back this time with me soaked and not just dripping in sweat. I gave Olivia an earful but in hindsight I think that it was a little hypocritical of me since I also separated from the group. In the end it turned out that she had done some swimming instead of hiking and two men had gotten her back to the trail that led her back to the resort and everyone ended up safe and sound.
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