Shadows and Tall Trees

TLDR : it sucks We had only two things to do in Hawai'i: get a COVID test, and board the ship. We planned to get here a couple of days early in case of flight problems -- there are lots of Australians posting about delays and lost luggage -- but things for us turned out just fine. So we found ourselves in Honolulu for two days with no real plans. With nothing scheduled in a city we've never visited, we decided to just spend the day walking around Waikiki. Starting with breakfast at Aloha Breakfast, a Mr. Breakfast -esque greasy spoon next door to our AirBnB, It was okay. The next stop was the beach, a mere two blocks away, where we took turns standing in the ocean. Standing there in the water, being buffeted about by waves, watching it roll in over the sand, was like something out of a movie. It was even this mystical turquoise colour that regular water just isn't. And even though I was on a beach surrounded by dozens of people, there was a stillness I wasn't quite expe...

 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 (...