This week’s travel dream: Obama’s Hawaiian island

Kailua may share the same island as Honolulu, but it feels a world away, said Lawrence Downes in The New York Times. This small beach town on Oahu, where I was raised, was once home to Hawaiian royalty. More recently, “President Obama has claimed Kailua as his.” Though he grew up in Honolulu, it is to this side of the island that he returns each December for a holiday at one end of Kailua’s crescent bay, “whose waters he knows from boyhood.” It’s his version of a “place called Hope, his San Clemente, his Texas Hill Country.”

Kailua is “the kind of little town that makes for good memories”—with an annual Fourth of July parade and markets that sell local tomatoes, papayas, and torch-ginger blossoms. From Honolulu, you approach it from 1,000 feet above, emerging from a tunnel that cuts through the island’s high mountain ridge to look down upon “a lush terrain of old fishponds, streams, marshes, soft volcanic cinder cones, and the blue, isle-dotted bay.” On a recent visit, jet lag has me up before dawn to watch the sun rise. Kailua is a morning town: “The bay looks east, and first light brings out runners and ambling couples with dogs and cups of coffee.” The sand is cool at dawn, but even at that hour the “water is bathtub warm” as I float on my back “and the sun rises behind my toes.”

After a breakfast of papaya with lime at my mother’s, I head downtown and note gentrification slowly moving in: A Target has replaced a popular Japanese-style general market. My wife and I escape the crowds by heading to neighboring Waimanalo, a small town where the real Hawaii is, where “it lingers strongest.” Knowing that the best way to feel the land is “with a short, mildly strenuous hike,” my wife and I stop near a small ridge between the towns and head up a path full of cactus flowers and butterflies. At the summit, we soak it all in. The airport awaits us. This is a last stop, “a last gathering of those sensations of surf and warmth, of sun squinting and salt smell” to take with us back to the mainland.

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Though Kailua has no hotels, it does have bed-and-breakfasts, many illegal. Pat’s Kailua Beach Properties (patskailua.com) is a safe option. Rooms start at $100 a night.