Sunday we were supposed to wake up at 2 am and leave the hotel by 2:30 am in order to drive to the Haleakala mountain top (volcano top really) to watch the sky lighten and change colors as the sunrise approached. Not surprisingly, since we had been running around at a pretty good clip for the past 10 days (even longer if you include pre-wedding stress in Japan), we slept in past our 2 am wake up time all the way until 3:15 am when one of us shouted an expletive and we scrambled out in a mere 15 minutes and were on the road at 3:30 am - one hour later than planned. Borrowing from Harvey Keitel's character, Winston Wolfe, in Pulp Fiction ("It's thirty minutes away. I'll be there in ten."), we made the 2 - 2 1/2 hour drive in 1 1/2 and made it there at 5 am, just in time for another one last Hawaiian nature show.
After a great finale to a great trip, we drove back down to the airport; this time at a more reasonable clip, and found ourselves with a couple of hours to kill before we needed to check in for our 10 am flight back to Honolulu. So we decided to take a nap in a parking lot near the airport, then have breakfast, and drive over to the airport. We were awoken after about a half an hour by my cell phone. It was Go! airlines telling us that our flight had been canceled, later flights were booked, so our only option to get to Honolulu (and our later flight to Tokyo) was to get to the airport within 10 minutes! Luckily we were very close. We filled up the rental car with gas, I dropped off Yumi to get our boarding passes, dropped off the rental car, and took the shuttle back. We waited in the very long security line and ran over to the plane, boarded, caught our breath, and cooled down. We made it. As it turns out, several others in the same predicament boarded in the 10 minutes or so after we did. Really it was a luckily confluence of events because the airline didn't have my cell phone number - they had my sister's home number, who happened to be there and happened to have my brand new cell phone number. Then we were lucky that we happened to be near the airport instead of, say, on top of Haleakala. It's not the way I would have chosen to catch a flight but it was better than the alternative of missing an international flight.
After a great finale to a great trip, we drove back down to the airport; this time at a more reasonable clip, and found ourselves with a couple of hours to kill before we needed to check in for our 10 am flight back to Honolulu. So we decided to take a nap in a parking lot near the airport, then have breakfast, and drive over to the airport. We were awoken after about a half an hour by my cell phone. It was Go! airlines telling us that our flight had been canceled, later flights were booked, so our only option to get to Honolulu (and our later flight to Tokyo) was to get to the airport within 10 minutes! Luckily we were very close. We filled up the rental car with gas, I dropped off Yumi to get our boarding passes, dropped off the rental car, and took the shuttle back. We waited in the very long security line and ran over to the plane, boarded, caught our breath, and cooled down. We made it. As it turns out, several others in the same predicament boarded in the 10 minutes or so after we did. Really it was a luckily confluence of events because the airline didn't have my cell phone number - they had my sister's home number, who happened to be there and happened to have my brand new cell phone number. Then we were lucky that we happened to be near the airport instead of, say, on top of Haleakala. It's not the way I would have chosen to catch a flight but it was better than the alternative of missing an international flight..
After that things were rather uneventful. We killed another 4 or so hours before our 1:30 pm departure to Tokyo. Unlike our flight to Hawaii when we arrived 12 hours before we left, we arrived 27 hours later after our 8 hour flight (that whole international dateline thing). Add to that immigration and customs and 3 hours worth of train rides, we finally got to our apartment around 9 pm on Monday night. My unlucky bride had to go to work the next day while I was lucky to have 2 weeks of vacation ahead of me which somehow disappeared into the ether.
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