March 25, 2011

Quite literally, the longest day of my life. When traveling so far west you tend to gain time in the day. Traveling to Hawaii from Utah gets you an extra four hours. Well to me, four hours seemed more like fourty-eight hours instead. 

The day started at 4 a.m.. Each of us had thrown our bags in the back of the truck and raced for the Airport 50 minutes away to Salt lake City. Airport Security was one of the low-points in the day for me. I had chosen to wear my ACU bottoms which would only stay up if I had a belt fastened around my waste. Well, it just so happens that when passing through security, you must take everything that has metal off and have it go elsewhere for about 60 seconds as you pass through a detector. I knew that of course, but did not plan ahead so well. As i struggled to keep my pants from falling off i had forgotten a few things in my side pockets: My boarding pass and a water bottle. Security had to stop me before going through the detector... twice. 

Below is a picture i took of the sunrise above the clouds over Utah.

Personally i felt that as the worst part of the day, but for everybody else the worst part of the day came when we had our flight delayed in Los Angeles(to Maui). Seconds before the plane was suppose to back out from the docking station, a luggage car ran into one of our engines disabling the aircraft from taking off. That event caused the flight to be delayed by 1hour and 15 minutes as they called in a different aircraft from the hangar.

Below is a picture of San Clemente Island as we leave the west coast.

Yea... those are clouds from 35,000 feet up.

6 hours later, after flying over half of the largest ocean in the world and nothing to look at but the largest ocean in the world, we land in Paradise. I texted my friends "Aloha from Maui" and the first thing i got was "How was the flight?"  I responded instantly with: "If I ever have to look at another body of water again im gonna shoot myself." 

Below is a photo of a tiny gecko we found in the condo.

We figured maybe it was trying to sell us some insurance.