Hawaii started to become "my home that's not a home" in late 1984. My first novel, The Last Book, had just been published in Oregon, and I decided to celebrate by trading a free week from my Nevada timeshare for a family holiday in Honolulu. I invited my mother and her second husband, who were living in the mountains of Northern California at the time, to join my wife and I in Oahu.

I had been to Hawaii several times on stopovers from Japan, so I knew the weather was perfect year-round. What's more, Waikiki is one of those few places in the world that always looks as good viewed in person as it does in the picture postcards. My mother fell immediately in love with the islands, and we all had a wonderful week being tourists together. But upon their return to the mainland, she and her husband ran into a snowstorm and their car stalled out on the way home. She turned to him and asked, "Why are we here in a blizzard when we could be living in paradise?" Two months later, they packed up everything and moved to Honolulu.

Life in that tropical city turned out to be quite good for them, but a few years later they discovered the lushness of the Kona Coast and wanted to move again. Rather than rent an apartment, I suggested they look for a condo to buy. If they could find the right place at the right price, I would purchase it and they could live there as my tenants at below market price. The details of setting up a checking account, arranging escrow, and securing a mortgage via "mail order" from overseas could fill the rest of this website. But we managed it somehow. They resettled on the Big Island in 1990, and her husband even found work as a maintenance man for the condo complex I had bought into.

Three years later, however, he died of a stroke. My mother moved back to Honolulu to be closer to friends, and I was unable to sell the condominium into what had become a very soft real estate market. That's how I happened to end up with a local property manager, a parade of new tenants, the quarterly taxes to pay, and all of my American financial dealings based in Hawaii... a great place to visit, but I doubt I'll ever live there. A fellow who likes to travel as much as I do would just catch islanditis.

Tired of losing money every month, I finally sold the condo at a loss in July 1999. It was an expensive lesson in real estate. Not only did I lose about $30,000, the Hawaiian State Tax Department withheld about $5,000 from the escrow for something called HARPTA. Now I have to file nine years worth of nonresident income tax statements to reclaim the tax they withheld. Talk about bureaucracy! I'm glad to be out of the landlord game. I just wish I still had my shirt on. What once was appraised as a $164,000 property put less than $7,000 in my pocket at the close of escrow. The mortgage company got the bulk of the sale price, the agent's fees, closing costs, and some disputed sewerage charges ate up the rest. So goes paradise....