Getting there was not half the fun

Getting to Hawaii takes a long, long time, at least if you are leaving from Washington. We woke up around 6:15 AM on our day of departure and hurried through a frantic breakfast to be ready for our 7 AM taxi. We made it with a minute or two to spare. It was another cold day in Washington with temperatures in the high thirties. Fortunately there was no precipitation to contend with. All of our flights would take off and arrive on schedule. 

There are no direct flights to Honolulu from Washington Dulles Airport so we switched planes in Dallas-Fort Worth. We flew an American Airlines 737 to Dallas. We picked up our “Bistro Bag” (snack) on our way into the plane. Sitting down in my assigned seat I noticed something odd: my knees were not touching the seat in front of me. American Airlines decided to remove a lot of coach seats so people wouldn’t feel so cramped. What a concept! (Someone tell Southwest!) In addition the seat seemed an inch or two wider than I expected. This made for a comfortable flight to Dallas for the three of us. The bistro bag was fairly good as airline food goes too. But it was more than three hours fighting the jet stream all the way before we arrived in Dallas. 

Knowing we still didn’t have seat assignments on the flight to Honolulu (not that we hadn’t tried to get them at the airport), Terri zoomed out of the airplane and to our next gate upon arrival. The flight to Honolulu was overbooked and the airline was looking for people to take a later flight. I was worried we’d be unlucky victims but fortunately we did get the very last three seats on the flight and entered the aircraft just as they were readying to shut the door! Unfortunately we were not sitting together. Terri and Rosie had seats next to each other. Mine was many rows up. The connection was very fast. Rosie and I had just arrived at our gate when they starting boarding the airplane! All this nervousness contributed to a killer headache and I couldn’t find any Tylenol. The connection was so fast I wondered if our luggage made it too. Fortunately it did. 

This flight was in a 767, a much bigger aircraft that seated seven across in coach, with three seats in the center. My head pounding I asked for Tylenol from the flight attendant instead of the usual snack. That did the trick for most of the flight. Once airborne there was little to do but wait for eight and a half hours. I didn’t think the flight would take that long, but it was worse than flying to Europe. Two full-length movies were not enough to keep us entertained. To keep the passengers from getting restless we got lots of bad CBS TV shows, like “Everyone Loves Raymond” too. Yech! So I spent much of my time reading. 

The duration of the flight made me appreciate just how far and remote Hawaii actually is from the United States. From Washington the distance is about 5,000 miles! Put another way, we traveled more than a fifth of the way around the world. The portion over the Pacific Ocean seemed to go on and on and on. Fortunately we finally arrived about 4:30 PM local time, or 9:30 PM back in the East, or 13 hours or so after we left. It was just another Friday rush hour in Honolulu when we arrived, although the airport seemed rather quiet to me. Still it was nice to step off the plane into weather in the high 70s and sunshine. 

Waikiki is a beach resort town on the east side of Honolulu. It was pretty easy to find a Roberts Hawaii bus that would take us to our hotel. We arrived with the sun beginning to set. I was starting to feel seriously jet lagged. But we agreed to try to stay up instead of going to bed. We were dropped off at our hotel: the Aston Waikiki Sunset, an all condominium hotel. It struck me strange when we walked into the lobby of the hotel to find the place didn’t have any doors! I guess when the weather perpetually hovers between 65-85 who needs doors when there is always someone at the desk anyhow? The Sunset is a modern hotel with 38 floors and 4 elevators. Our room was on the 16^th Floor. Terri loved the room. We had our own private bedroom with a king size bed and a view facing the ocean. Rosie had a queen size sofa bed in the living room all to herself. And we had a full size kitchen and bar for whatever we wanted. We decided to eat all our breakfasts in our room and save some bucks. 

But first we had a craving for some non-airline food. The hotel is about four blocks from the beach --a short walk. There we found a fast food place called (I swear I am not making this up) “Wolfgang Puck” that served an eclectic menu. Nearby was the ubiquitous ABC store full of basic necessities, so we loaded up on milk, cereal, bread and eggs. (ABC is apparently a local chain, and not a liquor store, although they sell some spirits. You can’t walk more than a block in Waikiki without hitting an ABC.) Filled we staggered back to our hotel room. I was in bed by 9 PM. But heck it was after 2 AM back home! A 20-hour day was long enough for me!