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From inland N.J. to balmy Hawaii shore

Garden State transplant.

For weeks, we've been flooded with sun-soaked teasers advancing the Philadelphia International Flower Show, which starts Sunday and has a Hawaiian theme.

But one story line's been missing.

Who knew the mayor of Honolulu is a Jersey boy or that its first lady hails from Doylestown?

Meet Peter and Judy Carlisle, tropical transplants, shown here in September 2010, after he was elected to finish out the previous mayor's term. (He resigned to run, unsuccessfully, for governor.)

Peter, now 59 and the first to head west, describes his journey from Ridgewood, Bergen County, where he grew up, to Honolulu, on the island of Oahu, where he's lived for more than three decades, as "sort of an arduous trip."

Arduous, schmarduous. Consider the payback! As Judy says, "It's chilly today. It's in the 70s."

Peter's story actually begins at UCLA law school, where he enrolled after graduating from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He opted for a one-term internship at the prosecutor's office in Honolulu; his other choice was a stint with a public defender's office in Alaska.

"That was one decision that was made faster than the speed of light," Peter recalls. "Honolulu, here I come!"

After law school, he was recruited back to the prosecutor's office, where he stayed for more than a decade before entering private practice. Then, in 1996, he was elected Honolulu's top prosecutor for the first of four times, before running for mayor in 2010.

Incidentally, and incredibly, Peter ran and was elected as a nonpartisan. He's up for reelection later this year.

Judy's Hawaiian adventure began in 1970, when she saw a cousin at a family funeral. He was living in Hawaii and, hearing that she was at loose ends, suggested she try it out.

"I love the beach, I love the ocean, I thought, OK," says Judy, who already knew how to surf. She had learned the previous summer in Ocean City, N.J., while working as a waitress and chambermaid.

Judy was a graduate of Central Bucks High school "before we had two of them," and had studied for two years at Edinboro State College. With no blueprint for her future, and despite her parents' prescient fears that she'd never move back to Pennsylvania, she took off for Hawaii.

She was all of 20.

Judy found a job right away as a cocktail waitress, and eventually got a degree in travel industry management at the University of Hawaii. She worked first for a travel company, then for Xerox, where she stayed for 22 years.

She and Peter met through a mutual friend, married in 1984, and have two kids. Daughter Aspen, 26, is a prosecutor in Kentucky; son Benson, 23, just joined the U.S. Coast Guard.

Judy, now 62, says they all love Hawaii for its warm people, beautiful weather and geography, amazing cultural diversity, and cuisine. Also, the fact that "things happen on Hawaiian time" - it's very laid-back - and that "wearing bathing suits year-round tends to lead you toward a more healthy lifestyle."

There are drawbacks, too, Judy says: Hawaii is expensive; traveling back east is costly in time and money, and all that sun makes for a lot of skin cancer.

Coming home to Doylestown, where her 92-year-old mother still lives, can be strange, too. "Pennsylvania winters feel weird," Judy says. "So does being in the Caucasian majority . . . and we don't do maple and oak trees in Hawaii."

And, the couple has learned, a lot of Americans don't do Hawaiian history.

"There's a tremendous ignorance about it," says Peter. "A lot of people genuinely believe Hawaii is a backward place, that we live in grass huts and spend all our time drinking mai tais on the beach."

There is beach time, certainly. Peter took up surfing six years ago and struggles for words to adequately convey what it's like "being in the water as the sun rises over Diamond Head."

"We have a connection to the ocean around here and it's rejuvenating in a lot of ways," he says. "We're just this small patch of islands in the middle of this magnificently large ocean, which clearly is the source of life. I think it's good to renew your understanding of how small we are compared to it."

As for Judy, she's learned to hula, even danced it at her wedding. Neither Carlisle gardens much with Hawaii's colorful tropicals; Judy does basil in the backyard and got an upside-down tomato plant for Christmas.

And they won't be coming to Philadelphia's Islands of Aloha flower show. Why would they? They're living the aloha life.

But here's a strange one. In the midst of what Judy calls "our tropical paradise," she's suddenly hankering to do something she hasn't done since the 1980s:

Take up ice skating.