I’m aware that I’ve been a little, um, preoccupied with myself this week. And that I’ve been blogging about mundane matters like laundry and how tired I am and jet lag – so on and so forth. So to make up for it, here’s a little about our trip.
Wednesday: flew to San Antonio; spent the night with Bethany, Mom & Meredith close to the airport.
Thursday: got up early to head to the airport. Flew to DFW, where we had our last taste of Mexican Food…
…then willingly climbed into a tiny seat where we stayed for EIGHT HOURS.
I may or may not have kissed the ground as we stepped onto the jetway in Honolulu.
One thing I did do was start immediately taking pictures. Because pictures of the airport are always so meaningful.
At least I wasn’t the only one.
When we got into the terminal, we were met by two people: a lady holding three leis and a man from Norwegian Cruise Lines. The leis were from mom! (Technically, so was the Norwegian Cruise Lines guy, but that’s irrelevant.)
We took a leisurely stroll through the airport straight to the ladies room. Then we identified our luggage so that a very nice, very strong Hawaiian man could load it from baggage claim onto our transport van. By the time we reached the Waikiki Marriott, it was dark.
(View from our balcony of Waikiki at night.)
The very nice man who worked at the front desk at the Marriott upgraded our room so that we each had our own bed. It was awesome! I never even knew rooms existed with four beds!
I was so exhausted by the time we got to our room, I seriously couldn’t decide between eating or sleeping or showering first. In fact, I can’t remember now what we did that night, but I do remember being so so so happy to fall into that bed, and I remember how incredible the shower felt after all the traveling.
Our time on Oahu was not wasted, as mom had arranged an early morning tour the day after we arrived. I think we were initially worried about the fact that it left at 6:45am, but once Friday morning arrived and we were all awake at 4:30am, we realized how great the 4 hour time change was. Instead of it being 4:30am, to us it felt like 8:30am! By the time our tour bus left, it felt like 11am – which was a good thing since our tour bus driver was incredibly cheerful for that time of day. He could have been seriously annoying, but instead we enjoyed him thoroughly and by the time we returned back to our hotel around 6pm, we felt like we had a wonderful working knowledge of Hawaii and Oahu, in particular. But more importantly, we spotted a mall with a Nordstrom in it not far from our hotel!!!!
Here are just a few of the pictures I took that day on Oahu.
Here we all are looking chipper and happy before starting our tour of Oahu!
Wall of names at Pearl Harbor:
Greg, our tour guide:
Greg said he actually had someone ask once if this model of the airplanes the Japanese flew over Pearl Harbor was life size. Seriously???
I think the thing that most surprised me about Oahu – and all of the islands – were the mountains. I expected beautiful beaches and greenery and flowers. But I was not prepared for the majesty of the mountains. Just caught me off guard. Our tour guide on Hilo actually said the two volcanoes that make up that side of the big island (Hawaii) are the two tallest in the world – if you measure from the base to the peak. The reason this is true is because the base is rooted in the earth’s crust, way below sea level. But even though it doesn’t look that tall, they do get snow from time to time so they can actually ski in the morning and surf in the afternoon! But it’s difficult to ski since there are no ski lifts and you have to HIKE up to the top of the mountain.
I think I’ll stick to surfing.
