Friday, June 8, 2012

Day 7- Heading Home

Monday morning was pretty laid back for us. Kristi and I went walking down by the missing man formation. They have a walking/jogging path there that is right by the water way that brings the ships in and out of Pearl Harbor. It was really nice getting to walk down by the water. When we got back it was breakfast time. Seth and Hayden decided to share a poptart. Unfortunately, they also decided to eat it off the floor. Joss and Seth got a nice tan while we were in Hawaii. I love her flip flop lines. :) After breakfast, I had Patrick entertain the kids while I packed all our bags and showered. I was a little nervous about the weight of our big suitcase. I had stuffed all of our clothes into the one bag and it was pretty heavy, but Kristi's scale said we would be okay. After getting everything and everyone all ready to go home, we had some lunch with Mike and Kristi, said our goodbyes and headed to return our rental car. When we got to the airport, we checked our big heavy bag in at the counter and it weighed in at 50.0 lbs. Anything more and we would have had to get in a huge line to repack our bag and start all over again. Phew! After checking everything in and going through security we headed for the gate. We saw on the map that it was pretty much the furthest gate from us. So we headed as quickly as we could herd our two kids while carrying our carry-on bags. As soon as we got to the gate, they were telling people that the gate had been changed and it was now leaving from the other side of the airport. You know, the side that we had just come from. So we herded the kids all the way back. When we got to the new gate, we found out that they were having so technical problems with our plane and that they were unsure of when they were going to be fixed. Ugh. This was a little after noon that we got to the new gate. They told us that the would have more information for us at 3:30. So we found some seats, and tried to keep the kids entertained. Joss enjoyed getting to play with the ipad. Seth just wanted to run away and get into everything. He was very frustrating, but Patrick was so beyond patient with him. He is amazing. After a long 3 hours with the kids, we found out that the plane is still having problems and that they would have more information for us at 7pm. Double UGH! They did give each of us a $20.00 meal voucher to use at the different restaurants in the airport. At this point, Seth is beyond tired and did I mention that he had a cold too. He was one really unhappy boy. I knew that he was tired, so I tried rocking him to sleep, but he wanted nothing to do with it. So I put him down and he cuddled up with his blanket and passed out it 30 seconds. It was such a relief and not just for me, but for everyone else too. While he was asleep, a nice lady came and told me about how when her kids were about the same age she had to move to the Philippines. Her husband was already there and so she had to take the two kids and all their belongings on a 16 hour flight, then a 3 hour layover and than another 4 hour flight. She said she was exhausted and that when she got to her destination, they authorities wouldn't let her husband through to help her with all the bags and the two kids, so she had to go through customs and everything all by herself. That would be a tough trip. Patrick decided to take Joslyn with him to scout out where we wanted to use our vouchers. While they were gone they went down to the gardens on the ground floor. Apparently, a lot of people don't know that the airport has gardens down below the main walkways. There are three of them and each one has a different theme. There are the Japanese Garden, the Chinese Garden, the Hawaiian Garden and the C.B. Lansing Garden. Joss enjoyed the Chinese Garden. Here is the C.B. Lansing Garden from the walk way above. So if you ever have a really long delay or just a good sized layover, I recommend going down to see the gardens. When we went to use the meal vouchers, you couldn't split them between stores, so you either used all twenty dollars at one place or you lost the money. So when we went to Burger King to buy the kids chicken nuggets for dinner, we ended up getting them each a ten piece chicken nugget meal. They were in heaven. Here is Joss enjoying her nuggets. Patrick and I went to a Chinese food place that wasn't very good, but it is airport food so I wasn't expecting much from it anyway. We did get to enjoy this beautiful sunset while we ate though. After dinner, Patrick went to Starbucks and bought smoothies and cookies for dessert. We were totally stuffed by this point, but we still wanted to use our last voucher, so I took Joss and we went looking for somewhere that we could buy stuff to take home with us. After going pretty much around the whole airport, I decided to ask one of the news stand employees if we could use our vouchers there and they said that we could, so we loaded up on candy and juice and headed back to Patrick and Seth. By this time it was 7pm, and they told us that they were taking the plane for a test flight and that they would be letting us know soon when we would be boarding, which ended up being 8:30pm for a flight that was supposed to leave at 2:55pm. We were exhausted, and just wanted to be leaving. Joss didn't even make it to take-off before she was out in her seat. Seth had a hard time getting to sleep until he gave up on getting comfortable on Patrick or me and slipped down to the floor and slept there. I can't sleep on airplanes which made this trip really really long. Especially since the pilot decided to not show the in-flight movie for whatever reason. I ended up playing games the whole time on the ipad. Our flight came in at about 6:30, so we got to see the sunrise while we were on the plane. We made it to our house around 8:00 and we all went to bed for about 3 hours. It was much needed! Patrick and I didn't recover for a few days. It was a rough ending to our wonderful trip but we had an amazing time and would love to go back someday.

1 comment:

Five Bresees said...

Wow! What a flight! Was that Hawaiian Air?