Even though it is Alan's night to blog and he's had a 3.5 hour nap this afternoon, I've been made to do it. Of course, Alan will still have to add his 2 cents worth which we all know gets rounded down to nothing. So, his nothing comments will be in pink.
We woke at 6am today at Alan's direction even though I thought we should have been up earlier for our 9am flight. The heavy rain overnight had caused havoc on the road but thankfully that havoc was not near the airport. A very smooth trip by taxi and we arrived at the American Airlines terminal. As usual, I was right in my time management skills. This was one of the tickets that formed part of the Qantas frequent flyer points we received from my parents. After a few hiccups with their automated check-in, we learned that the flight was full and again we didn't have seats together. However, we weren't flagged for extra security by airport staff. We asked the desk attendant at the gate if there was anything he could do and thankfully we was able to do a bit of a shuffle and seat us together.
We knew ahead of time that we would need to purchase food and headphones for this flight. What we didn't know is that they were trialling a new system where no cash would be accepted. We quickly ran off and bought some ham and cheese rolls for the flight before the door shut. It's very annoying that so many Qantas frequently flyer points were used to get us on a flight where we don't get a free feed or at least a set of headphones. San Francisco airport had 4 runways operating this morning with planes coming and going and criss crossing each other at a very regular rate. I sure wouldn't want to be an air traffic controller organising all that chaos.
After a 5 hour flight, we arrived into a very warm and humid Honolulu just after 11am. We'd had a problem a few days ago when a simple question asked of the agency through whom we had booked our ground transport had prompted them to cancel it on us. Many emails were sent telling them not to cancel it, with them responding that they had tried to call us and left an urgent message for us to call but as we hadn't responded, they had cancelled the ground transport. Of course we hadn't responded ... they had left the message on our home answering machine. Hadn't occurred to them that although we had taken a trip to the Grand Canyon through them a few weeks ago that we weren't at home.
As we walked off the plane I saw someone with the Diamond Head tours folder and as we walked towards her, she asked if we were Alan and Sarah. It would appear that they had received information about the cancellation but were expecting us anyway. Must happen every now and then.
We were ushered with others to baggage claim and our bags and us were quickly whisked away to the bus and were on our way to our accommodation. On the bus were a family from Brisbane. We've encountered two lots of Brisbanites in two days.
The hotel is lovely, just as we had hoped. We had to wait until 3pm to check in but when we did, we weren't disappointed. Between arriving here and checking in we took a walk over to the beach and down the street looking around the shops. We each had the thickest thickshake I think I've ever had in my life. It took me a good few minutes of sucking before anything started to come up the straw. There was a dude on the street with his 2 pet macaws which we had some photos taken with. Of course he wanted payment afterwards. We are on the 18th floor with a lovely ocean view room. While Alan slept this afternoon I sat and read, watching the beach. I then watched the sunset whilst listening to the music and singer coming from the bar area of our hotel.
Alan finally pulled himself out of bed in time for us to go down and get a pizza and some drinks and we returned to the room. Alan has just had a shower only to find we have no hot water. We must do something about that tomorrow and definitely before I have to shower.
We have two cooler bags in our room for our BOB - Breakfast on the Beach in the morning. The hotel puts on breakfast but instead of you dirtying tables around the pool, they make you take it to the beach. We will hit the BOB early as the company who picked us up this morning from the airport has free breakfast for us at Planet Hollywood. I think it is nothing more than a hard sell on tours while you are here but as we are only here for two days, and one tour is booked for one day, they aren't going to get us to do anything other than take a second breakfast.
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