Thursday, September 3rd, 2009
The time had finally arrived. After a sixty-eight day iGoogle countdown widget, a battery of day-by-day, hour-squeezed afternoons and evenings at work, and an intensity of multi-tasking life sequences, the vacation we had all been waiting for, Oahu 2009, was in our travel agenda. Our trek began at 5am, and we were all up preparing the Durango for departure to the airport. We loaded our rolling cubes of clothware into that beastly monster on four wheels and set forth to PDX. Check-in and all that jazz was accomodated smoothly, and soon enough we were aboard Hawaiian Airlines enroute to Honolulu.
After five-and-a-half hours, a ridiculous viewing of Night at the Museum 2, ten minutes of shut-eye, and a complimentary breakfast burrito, we touched down in Oahu where the beginning leg of our adventure officially started. Making our way to baggage claim literally a mile away via foot, I was strangely surprised to not only see one of those enormous double-decker Japan Airlines Boeing aircrafts, but also a group of Asians bearing white filter masks. It was something random I didn’t quite expect to see.
After we finally reached Alamo rentals and waited in line for quite a while, we loaded up our Suzuki Grand Vitara (should have gone with the Jeep Commander) and proceeded to navigate towards Costco where we would purchase some food for the rental condo located north in Hauula. The roadways in Honolulu are crazy – and my GPS not only took about 10 minutes to acquire adaquat signals, but also proved little help as some of Oahu’s highways traveled above the normal roadways, leading us wrong directions and announcing innacurate turn-by-turn cues. I resourced to my iPhone to achieve a quick GPS fix on our location. From there, I was able to manually direct us to Costco. But the fun doesn’t stop there. We turned into the wrong lane and missed the single unmarked entrance to the famous red-striped wherehouse. Fifteen minutes later, after negotiating cut-through roads, one-way streets, and a blocked-off road, we learned from our mistakes, arrived at Costco, sought out a parking spot, purchased lunch, got our groceries, lost ourselves attempting to head north to Hauula, and eventually pulled into Pat’s at Punaluu. It was exhausting.
Later that evening, we saw some unidentified flying objects which I am wholeheartedly speaking the truth about, were thrilled and baffled to oblivion, and finally headed to bed 10:30pm Hawaiian time zone.
That was our day of travel… A whirlwind in itself.
Posted from my iPhone 3G
