Day 1: Hawai'i Bound

 Now I remember why I stopped blogging.

I'm not really good at this "do it live, one take, let it all hang out" style of writing. Most times it takes me a little while to get my thoughts together. My usual process is to put things down, let them coalesce, see if I can find the themes, and do a lot of editing  before I post something. But that's not conducive to this style of blogging, which is: get the details of my trip out ASAP because the people crave content!

Well, we shall see.

Tamara points out this was not our longest travel day. We went to Montreal in July, and that trip took about 19 hours, from getting to the airport to arriving at our AirBnB. This trip only took 15 hours, and we covered almost 5600km. That's 373km/hour -- and most of that was from us hustling through customs in Vancouver trying to make our connecting flight. (Montreal was a mere 124km/h. That is a particularly slow day on the Number 1.)

The flights were mostly uneventful. We had Brian (AKA Dad in a Box) with us, of course, and had the necessary paperwork in case anyone asked us about him. But no one did. He got x-rayed a couple of times, but generally he was just another piece of luggage. Maybe the cruise ship will treat him the same way? Checking Royal Caribbean's human cremains policy prior to the trip would have been the right thing to do. But now I guess we'll be using our Jedi mind tricks and hoping for the best instead.

One thing that was eventful that needs to be mentioned is the kindness from a few WestJet employees regarding dear old dad. The carry on policy is two items, and I already had a suitcase and my camera bag, so I didn't know if we'd be expected to squish him into a suitcase or what. But we managed to get our bags gate checked on each of our three flights, allowing Brian to come with us in the cabin as carry on. No one moved mountains for us, but it was nice not to have to worry about this, and these are busy people: we're not the only ones flying with special requests. Thanks, WestJet, for going out of your way to make things a little easier for us.

It's a six hour flight from Vancouver to Hawai'i, and the less said about that, the better. I dozed off a good portion of the time, between the screaming kids and half the plane trudging back and forth to the bathrooms. I thought about watching Jurassic World: Dominion, but let's be honest: that was equally likely to put me to sleep. 

My first impression of Hawai'i is... it's humid. Not something I thought about, but something I should have expected. The heat isn't oppressive, but the air is heavy with moisture. My glasses fogged up a little when we deplaned. There's a pervasive cloud cover and no stars. Is this just a nighttime thing? Or a downtown Waikiki thing? Honolulu gets about 16 inches of rain a year, mostly in the winter. So it could be just tonight's weather. 

And this brings me to another observation about buildings in warmer climates: there aren't real strong boundaries between inside and outside. I first noticed this during my trip to Phoenix a few years ago, where the quad at Phoenix College had, like, vending machines outside, hang out sofas, and a cafeteria. And all the stairwells were wide open to the outside, too. Here, as we headed toward baggage claim, we went through huge walkways that were just, like, outside. One of those little differences that we would never find back home, as we try to keep the weather out for half the year.

So that was the whole day. Right now I'm typing this up on a balcony of an AirBnB in Waikiki. The weather is humid, but the night is beautiful. And while I'm definitely tired, right now I really just want to hang out for a bit. Early COVID test tomorrow morning to meet our ship boarding requirements, and then who knows? There's a dingy, unkempt food stand half a block away that advertises breakfast at 8:00am, and these are generally pretty good joints. I'll keep y'all posted.