MAUNA BEACH HOTEL

For the next few nostalgic Tuesdays, I will post on the best hotels I have enjoyed in the past.  I will begin with the Mauna Beach Hotel on the Big Island of Hawaii because this was the first luxury hotel I ever experienced.

• Pearl and I got married on 22December1962, and I recall having part of our honeymoon at the Mauna Kea Beach Hotel.
• However, my memory must be faulty, because I checked Wikipedia and learned that this hotel opened on 2July1965.  So this must have been our second honeymoon.
• I was then working as a factory engineer at the Hutchinson Sugar Company in Naalehu, also on the Big Island.
• 
  The Mauna Kea Beach Hotel:
• Developed and constructed by Laurance Rockefeller, who fell in love with Kaunoa Bay on the Big Island.
• Secured a 99-year lease for a 500-acre parcel from Richard  Smart, owner of Parker Ranch, which at one time was the largest cattle ranch in the USA.  This is interesting.
• 
  19-year old John Palmer Parker jumped ship in Kealakekua, Hawaii Island in 1809, but went on to marry a granddaughter of King Kamehameha the Great, getting permission to manage and commercialize the then-wild cattle roaming the Big Island.  Those feral cattle were descendants of one bull and five cows given to Kamehameha (he is the one who united the islands) by British Captain George Vancouver in 1793.  Ranch founded in 1847, by Parker.

• 
  Richard Smart was born in 1913 and became the sole owner of Parker Ranch.  Mostly continued to remain in show business and let the Carter family run the ranch.  
• At its zenith, Parker Ranch covered 500,000 acres, with 30,000 head of Hereford cattle and paniolos (Hawaiian herders originally trained by Spanish vaqueros).

• 
  Part of this ranch served as a U.S. Marine Corps training base called Camp Tawara.
• Smart passed away in 1992, and this ranch is now governed by the Parker Ranch Foundation Trust. 
• Still a cattle ranch, but only on 130,000 acres.

So, anyway, back to the 60s, the matronly Royal Hawaiian Hotel in Waikiki, which opened in 1927, was considered to be luxury, but the only neighbor island hotel at this level in the 1960s was the Mauna Kea Beach Hotel.  Today, there are supposedly 15 luxury hotels in Hawaii, and I've stayed in 8 of them.  A few more will be featured in these nostalgic Tuesday posting.

The Mauna Kea Beach Hotel had a open-air design, and when it became operational in 1965, was named one of the The Three Greatest Hotels in the World by Esquire, as well as one of the 10 Best Buildings of 1966 by Fortune.

• 
  The golf course opened first in 1964, designed by Robert Trent Jones, commemorated by a televised match among Arnold Palmer, Jack Nicklaus and Gary Player.  Have played there half a dozen times.
• In 1978, was sold to United Airlines, and shortly thereafter, was renamed a Westin hotel.
• In 1990, Seibu Railway acquired the company and this property became a Prince hotel.

• 
  But only for  short while, for by end of the 1990s, reverted to again become a Westin.
• There was a serious earthquake in 2006, resulting in a $150-million renovation for reopening at the end of 2008, as managed by Marriott.

• 
  So I returned to stay at the Mauna Kea Beach Hotel in 2009.
• I went there because my wife had just passed away, and we had an ash-tossing ceremony up Mauna Kea, somewhat close to this hotel.
• I spent two nights here and had two great dinners at Monettes, enjoying the sunsets.

• Dinner on night two ended with the staff treating me to their signature desserts, with a Tawny Port wine.

I should add that I almost flew home instead of staying at the Mauna Kea Beach Hotel because there were several ocean storms approaching Hawaii, with the eye of Hurricane Felicia predicted to pass over my apartment in Honolulu.

As the Four Seasons Hualalai Hotel was just a short half an hour drive away, that was my next stop.

Next week, my stay at the Four Seasons Hualalai Hotel.

Hurricane Kiko just formed and is headed for Hawaii.

Projected to attain Category 4 strength by the end of the week.  However, models all show a weakening before impacting Hawaii.

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