There are few things more distressing than having to pack to leave Hawaii. Unfortunately our room was only paid for until noon. Terri took charge of the packing as she usually does, and we managed to consume almost all of the remaining breakfast food we had purchased.
There was one small problem: we had to vacate by noon but
our flight didn’t leave until around 7:30 p.m. Fortunately the hotel was glad
to hold our bags for us so we had the rest of the day to enjoy Hawaii and try to
pretend we weren’t leaving. But it wasn’t quite the same. We tarried over
the breakfast and packing and left our condo right before noon. Then we just
decided to walk up and down Waikiki and kill the afternoon.
As usual it was a wonderful day to do it. Hawaii was particularly dazzling in its beauty that day. Rosie wanted to get a Hawaiian braid in her hair so we went down to the International Marketplace and had it done there. We also bought some final little gifts and things we’d need on the plane. AA batteries had become essential to power the two CD players we now had. We spent nearly two hours at a park by the beach where the Duke’s statue and surfboard made excellent foreground. There was not much to do but wait on a bench and check out the cute chicks and guys in skimpy attire so it was a pleasant wait.
We bought our return transportation tickets to the airport the day we arrived. The porter at our hotel retrieved our baggage and we took turns going to changing rooms to get ourselves back in warm weather clothes. Our bus was dead on time and we arrived at the airport with a couple more hours to kill. We had bad food for dinner at a food court then just kept waiting and waiting for the boarding call. I’m sure we had the same 767 airplane returning us that we had coming out, because the same overhead bin popped open during takeoff.
