The Monster is My Constant: The Monster is My Constant

Namaste, and welcome to my one-shot blog post about my LOST experience on Oahu. Detailed herein, you will find evidence of the following:

1) My total and irrevocable devotion to all that is LOST
2) My questionable mental health
~and~
3) Mark's extreme patience and willingness to indulge my dorkier tendencies

To begin, lets start with the morning of the tour.

Like a kid on Christmas morning, I am wide awake and giddy by 4:45am even though our tour guide doesn't pick us up until 7am (via HUMMER!). What can I say? If you know me, you'll understand.

I pop a motion sickness pill in preparation for our sometimes off road adventure and saddle up in the front seat with our tour guide, Matt. We're off to pick up another couple at their hotel and then its go time! I bond immediately with the other couple and Matt because,well, its LOST! Its like the great unifier. Us vs. Them. Lost Fans vs. Everyone Else. On the surface, you can have absolutely nothing in common with someone. You may even dislike them a little bit. Then, they say the magic word and suddenly you're in a heated discussion about Schrödinger's Cat and its implications on jughead and the timeline reboot theory. ::SIGH:: I'm really going to miss this show.

Anyhoo, Matt won my favor almost immediately when he detoured from his boss's preferred tour route just so he could show us a few extra places of Lost significance. The first, was The Searcher - aka, Penny's rescue boat - which happened to be sitting in a harbor about a mile from our hotel. Mark and I circled back later for a photo op.

He also informed us that the harbor right outside our hotel was none other than the harbor where Desmond beat Ben to a bloody pulp! I later found the phone that Ben called Jack from. Because...yea...I'm sick.

We also passed through Downtown Honolulu- where he pointed out taller-Walt's school(where Locke and Abbadon met him off Island) which sits right next to the Honolulu prison- which is supposedly being used as a mexican prison in the upcoming season 6! Hmmm.

We then headed to the site of Jacob's Cabin which, incidentally, also happens to be the site where the Monster killed Mr. Eko. When we drove up there, the crew was already there setting up so we weren't allowed to take any pictures. I tried to get one on the sly but it ended up pretty blurry. Plus, um...there really wasn't anything there yet so it was just grass and trees and stuff. We stopped to chat with the crew and they told us they needed "pretty girls as extras" - I got momentarily excited before I realized that they were just trying to get laid. Booooo.

Onward to Anthony Cooper's house! AKA - Locke's kidney swindling Dad! The Lost crew apparently added the little security hut and some shrubbery but otherwise it looks pretty much the same. We were told that the owners don't really want people taking pictures. At that, I felt the overwhelming urge to shout "DON'T TELL ME WHAT I CAN'T DO!" but I refrained....barely. Instead, I took a picture!

Oh, I should point out that our music on the tour was the LOST score. Yea, so. That was awesome. Sadly, however, no DriveShaft. Charlie gets no respect. YOU ALL EVERYBODY!

From there, it was about 15 minutes to our next location so Matt regaled us with LOST facts and trivia. I visibly tensed when he mentioned that LOST came about because "JJ Abrams had an idea for a show about an Island" and I was THISCLOSE to correcting his obviously FALSE statement when he quickly recovered and corrected himself...So, I let it slide. But honestly? I could have GIVEN this tour. Career backup plan!!!

We then discussed our love for "Darlton" and the comedic joy of the LOST audio podcasts (pantsless Damon, banjo playing Carlton, the zombie season). Despite Mark's LOST naivety, I think he was impressed that the head writers of the show were just as loved by the fans as the show itself. Or maybe he was disturbed. Either way.

Next, we passed by the cockpit of Oceanic 815. Sadly, covered in a tarp. Still. Just knowing it was under there made me smile.

And then we stumbled upon more Season 6 sets-in-progress. The first was a building that had been painted to look like a Dominican Republic elementary school. Great, fine, whatever. That means very little to me right now. But the second was....

Submarine pier! Matt wasn't expecting there to be crew there but they were so he cautioned us against taking pictures. We couldn't go to the pier itself since it was being worked on so we watched a bit from a distance. The pier is really short, but the crew builds it out a bit longer when they need to film there. Then they throw in a faux submarine prop - the top of which was sitting in a truck waiting to be attached to the base of the sub (which was already in the water). I was so torn! I wanted a picture! But the crew was being very anti-Namaste and eyeballing us and our cameras warily! ARGHHH!!!

Witness my "I'm totally going to take a picture of the sub" face:

I was practically sick with a need for photographic evidence and finally decided that I wasn't going to leave without it. So I made like a tourist and took some random shots of this signpost (which, now that I look at it, may or may not be Lost related) and just happened to angle the camera in a way that included the sub-top. Not the best picture- but Matt did point out that this submarine was black (not the blue/gray of submarines past). Hmmm.

The next night, Mark and I happened to be driving back from the North Shore along this same road and bam- road flares and big white trucks everywhere- plus signs for Grass Skirt Productions! We had discovered filming in progress! My heart was aflutter! We could see the floodlights and equipment but nothing else from where we were. Mark offhandedly suggested sneaking in but I was not in the mood to be arrested. So our submarine should appear at night in episode 10 or 11.

Anyway, back to the tour. Next stop was Kualoa Ranch- where a crapload of Lost is filmed. I'm getting all Doc Jensen length with this post so I'm going to try and keep it short and sweet:

The outside view of the Tempest Hatch (minus prop door). Enough Said.

The inside-out view of the Tempest Hatch. Where the Jack/Juliet awkward kiss happens.

The logs where Ana Lucia discovers Goodwin is an Other...

Which is the same location that 1954-era Eloise "Ellie" Hawking holds a gun to a time-skipping Daniel Faraday. Re-enacted with the help of Mark.

JUGHEAD!!!! (Ok, nearly peed my pants when I saw this)

The logs where Jack chats with then attacks Ben. Today, the role of Benjamin Linus will be played by Maggie (Ha! AS IF I was going to play Jack!)

Prop-related re-enactments!

Hurley's Golf Course

The place where Hurley jumpstarts Roger "Workman" Linus' DHARMA van

Mark and I get judged by the Monster. I probably should have warned Mark against wearing a red shirt (RIP Juliet; Frogurt)

That was it for our actual Lost tour. We took the 5 hour version. The 10 hour version covers more but it was much easier to hit up those spots on our own when we were in the general vicinity so that's what we did. For example:

The bridge where Jin proposes to Sun!

And the site of Oxford University, the Monastery where Desmond does his stint as a monk & where Charlie and his brother discuss the future of DriveShaft

And, easily the most bizarre moment I had on the trip: The YMCA camp that serves as New Otherton/Dharmaville/The Barracks. Which were all still dirtied up from their 3 years of supposed DHARMA abandonment from Island 2004 to Island 2007. Only 6 of them were like that though. The rest were all pristine yellow- because, well, the kids at the camp have to stay somewhere!