Preliminary Hawaii Report

There's so much to tell about our trip to Hawai'i, and I've just spent about half of the day selecting pictures to put up. I chose 160 of 918 photos that we took that I thought would do a good job of representing our trip without boring everyone. They are posted in my Hawaii album on Picasa.

I also set up some of the sites that we visited on Google Maps. I haven't cross referenced the two yet, but I plan to at least to some degree. The map is pretty cool, the satellite images are pretty well detailed.

To start telling the story of our trip, I'll begin with the story of a canceled flight. Keep in mind that I booked our flight on July 24, 2006. We were supposed to fly out on Saturday, March 31. Just as we were about to board the plane to Phoenix for the first leg, we were called to the podium. Apparently the plane that was to take us from Phoenix to Honolulu had a mechanical issue, so we were supposed to go up front to the ticket counter so they could make other flight arrangements.

We spent about 5 hours at the ticket counter, with the next available seats being on Tuesday, April 3. Our original date to return was Saturday, April 10, and that's when our reservations at Bellows AFS ended. There was anger, frustration, and tears, as we saw our vacation plans disintegrating, and beyond our control.

We got back to the house and after I calmed down some I started making phone calls. First I called to see if we could extend our stay at Bellows. The cabins are generally reserved a year in advance, and as expected I could not extend. So I called looked into booking a room at Turtle Bay Resort, the place I knew about up on the North Shore of Oahu. I booked rooms there from Saturday until Tuesday. Then I called to change the rental car dates, then called the airline to let them know what they needed to do to salvage our trip.

So at about 3 a.m. on Tuesday, April 3, I rousted everyone out of bed to try again. We left Dulles about a half hour late at around 7:45, then hauled ass in Phoenix to make our connection to Lihue, HI. That flight we got to stretch out a little, since the airline could only find us a spot in first class. We were at Lihue for maybe an hour, then off we went to Honolulu. We arrived in Honolulu sometime around 4 in the afternoon.

I'll pick up the details from there in my next entry!