Hawaii Part I (Oahu)

Okay... I know we've been terrible about blogging, but we've really had a lot going on. In April we went to Hawaii for 10 days, and I'm going to do my best at giving a series of recaps via a blog post. We left for Hawaii on a Wednesday, and as we try to pull out of Austin the second engine wouldn't fire in our plane. Luckily the pilot brought us back to the gate to let us deplane, instead of waiting on the plane for the technicians to fix it.

We were able to get on an American flight taking us through DFW to Honolulu. We don't typically fly American, rather Continental, so this was going to be a good comparison for us. Patrick lucked out on our DFW to Honolulu leg of the flight to sit next to a recently divorced woman that wanted to use Patrick as a therapist. We were sitting across the aisle from each other, and I could totally tell that he was fake sleeping. To make matters worse, the AV system on the plane wasn't working and neither of us had iPods to keep us busy, just books. The second highlight of our American flight was that they don't serve meals, even on a 9 hour flight. You have to pay $10 for a chicken sandwich... Really? How much money is this really saving, especially when other airlines still serve food. When we got to Honolulu, of course our bags weren't there, so we filed a claim with American and headed to our hotel in Waikiki.

Because of the experience we were in need of some Mai-Tais and headed to Cheeseburger in Paradise for our first one (followed by a couple more) for this trip. After dinner headed to the beach then back to the hotel to find that American still didn't know where our luggage was. I decided it was time to beat the system because we knew (Continental told us) that our luggage was on a United flight out of LAX that had already landed. I called American 4 times, until I got someone that knew what they were doing. Finally we had a confirmed sighting of our bags, and they were on the way to the hotel. I completely passed out after the long day, but Patrick stayed up for the bags to be delivered at midnight. (this made for a 26 hour day for us)

The next morning we woke up and headed out to Pearl Harbor, which I had done as a child. It was even more impactful as an adult. While at Pearl Harbor, we toured the USS Arizona memorial and the Bowfin. The Bowfin was submarine that was like the one my grandfather was on, and it just reminded me how thankful I was for his service during the war. I couldn't imagine spending that much time in a small space, with all men, for a 3 month period of time. I couldn't help but think how much that submarine probably smelled....

That evening we headed to a luau where we ate pork that was cooked all day in a pit. There was a whole ceremony to taking the pig out of the ground, followed by talking the tourists into purchasing cheesy cups to get more alcohol, followed by the dancing.

As you can see from Patrick's picture below, we fell for the tourist trap and bought the cups.

After our quick stay in Oahu, we were off to Kauai. More to come in Part II....