Aloha blog faithful. I’m making a point of getting this quick update posted today just to stay in touch and let you know there will be much more coming tomorrow, on Friday December 29. The Hawaii trip was beyond special, and I want to be sharp with my writing to bring it all back to life. After an overnight flight, during which I slept not one single wink, and an arrival at MSP at around 5:20 a.m. when the airport was stunningly busy, still well before dawn, we got home to two sleepy cats around 6:15, or so, this morning after traversing some snowy streets and temps around zero.
After unpacking, helping the boyz reacclimatize to us (hey, spell check says that’s the word, not “reacclimate” which I’ve often used, so spell check wins this one) I laid down for a few minutes, just to relax, and that then turned into five or six hours. My brain is still a bit foggy, but I’m coming around. I still have many photos to download and a lot of writing to do, though, so I’ll save it for tomorrow, if you don’t mind.
I mentioned the flight delays because they were a stressful part of our outbound and return trips. When I booked the tickets, with an outbound connection in Salt Lake, the layover was supposed to be about 90 minutes. Then one of the flights was changed a bit, and as we took off for SLC we figured we only had about 45 minutes to get to the Honolulu flight. When we landed, we discovered the Honolulu flight was roughly two hours delayed. So, I had to change our inter-island flight to Kona on Hawaiian Airlines, since we were going to miss that. Stress to begin the vacation.
On the way back, we originally had a solid two hours in Honolulu between our Hawaiian Airlines flight and the Delta nonstop back to MSP. But, again, flight schedules were altered just a little and we thought we’d have around 55 minutes, which can be pretty tight at HNL were the island-hopper flights have their own terminal. Then the Hawaiian Air flights out of Kauai all got scrambled, with later ones leaving before earlier ones, gate changes left and right, and a very congested concourse as two Hawaiian 767s were leaving from adjoining gates that normally would only hold passengers from my smaller “island hopper” flights. It was claustrophobic and a mess. After a number of delays, we ran through HNL (or walked quickly) for a good 20-minutes to get to our MSP flight and its luxurious “lay flat” seats in the front cabin. But sleep was more than just elusive. It was impossible after all that.
Now, I’m home with two well adjusted boyz after Erica Moon took such good care of them. I’ll write all of the tales (at least the ones I can remember) tomorrow.
See you then! And I leave you with the final pic I took on Kauai. Looks like your standard 25-foot waterfall doesn’t it? It’s not. It’s closer to 150 or 200 feet. Those trees, near the top, are gigantic. A person would be minuscule next to them. And these scenes dot the Kauai landscape everywhere you look.
Aloha. See you Friday!!!
Bob Wilber, at your service and too foggy to write.
