Hawaii Diiary: Day 1

I will now proceed to torture you with more Hawaii trip stories that are not actually about Hawaii.

The plan was to depart Boston on Wednesday, September 30, and spend an entire day getting to the Kona Coast on the Big Island. That's a big downside to Hawaii as a destination for east-coasters -- it takes an entire day to get there or back. It explains why so many people on visitor logs were from California and Arizona. We would spend Thursday and Friday on the Big Island and depart Saturday for Kauai, where we would spend another week.

We left our house at 7:45 for a 10:55 flight. That seems early, and we are both kind of insanely paranoid about air travel, but we also had to expect to fight through traffic for up to 90 minutes to get there (I think it ended up being about an hour). I also wanted to leave enough time to park at an off-airport parking lot, since Central Parking at Logan is now a ridiculous $24 per day. Over 12 days, that is a buttload of money. I had read a few good things about PreFlight Airport Parking, only about 2 miles from Logan and almost half the price. The experience was very positive: we arrived at the lot, the van followed us to the car, the very friendly driver helped with our bags and handed us a "newspaper" (USA Today). We were inside the terminal in probably 7 minutes.

The flight boarded on time, but the departure was delayed because the plane's GPS system was malfunctioning. Always a good feeling. I guess we left 15-20 minutes late. Weather was clear for almost the entire flight, so I was able (from my window seat) to track our progress, and we didn't need the GPS. Most of my announcements of our location to Edith were met with smiles and nods. The highlight was when we flew over the Grand Canyon and Page, AZ (pictured above), site of our excellent slot canyon adventure in 2007. It was a good flight; we had nobody in the seat between us. I admit I was That Guy and booked the window/aisle seats, hoping the middle wouldn't get filled.

Landed in LAX with a 2 hour layover, and stalled for a while before looking for dinner. Options were disappointing: generic Tex-Mex (On The Border) and... something inspired by generic Tex-Mex? (Chili's), or Burger King. We chose On The Border. It was unremarkable, but I downed a couple of margaritas so I could maybe sleep on the plane, and they weren't bad.

My plan was thwarted when I was seated next to an older hippie dude named Dennis on the next leg of the trip, and he liked to talk. He was an interesting enough guy, and it was more entertaining than staring out the window at the ocean for 5.5 hours, but I ran out of stuff to talk about after a while, and just wanted some quiet time as it got closer to midnight EDT. Before that, I learned about how he retired to Hawaii, has turned his high blood pressure ("230 over something, been that way all my life") into extra Social Security disability payments, and has managed to live in Hawaii virtually tax free as a result of this status. Good deal if you can get it. He also talked about how he managed to have a car collection of at least 4 or 5 cars, a plantation of cotton (?), mangoes, guavas, papayas, bananas, avocados, macadamia nuts, coffee, the rest of the produce department, and a home with (apparently) about a half-dozen freezers, all on a half acre south of Keauhou. This, after he couldn't afford a houseboat since the slips in the harbor were too expensive.

We finally landed, on time, at about 8PM local time, or 2AM EDT. The Kona airport is kind of weird and feels a little bit like a trip back in time. There are no jet bridges, you climb down the old staircase-on-a-truck and walk across the tarmac to the gate area. Most of the terminal is exposed to the outside, with some basic structures to keep the rain/sun out of some areas, but not much in the way of walls. Under these shelters are wooden benches that constitute the waiting area at the gates. There is one traditional cafeteria-style restaurant. The overall layout might best be described as "rambling", with the gates, checkin and baggage claim areas all stretched along several hundred yards of access road. It took us a while to find the right baggage claim, not realizing we'd have to walk out of the gate area (the "airport" as far as we knew) and down the road. We learned that the Ironman Triathlon was scheduled for October 10, and training had already begun. There were quite a few intense-looking athletes milling about the claim area, surely wondering where their multi-thousand-dollar bikes were.

If you can believe it, the rest of the day only got more dull from here. I had picked up a package from Orbitz for a mid-size rental from Budget, and a "mountain view" hotel room at the Sheraton Keauhou Bay (4/5 stars), for $160/day, which seemed like a good deal at the time. We picked up our rental car (a Pontiac G6 that more than met our needs) without any problems. It was a 15-minute drive to the hotel, and they gave us a "garden view" room, which we learned the next day was basically a free upgrade. We crashed in bed.

Coming up: Volcano! And Brian looks like a drowned rat. (It'll be a few days until it's posted.)