Aloha!

We had a great flight from San Jose to Honolulu --the plane was configured with two aisles so Kevin and I had two seats next to the window and he got the aisle and I got the window. Awesome. We took off at 9 a.m. then slept and read and talked for 5 hours and got here by 11 a.m. Flying this direction is pretty easy. It's really in-credible to consider that we flew over 2500 miles of nothing but ocean. I realized why the pictures of the earth from outer space look so blue and have so many clouds. It's amazing that anyone ever found Hawaii - such small islands out in the middle of so much ocean. People think perhaps the first settlers followed birds that stopped here in their migration from Indonesia to Alaska.

Honolulu airport was rather confusing. We're so used to walking down to baggage claim to get our luggage. In Honolulu, you follow the signs to baggage claim...and they seemingly lead no where. We needed to take the wiki-wiki (wee-kee, wee-kee)--an old delapitated bus to another terminal --standing room only like we were in a foreign country all the way to baggage claim. This took us a while to figure out. Thankfully, all of the signs were in English. Internet "wikis" were named after this shuttle -- I wondered why. Maybe because no one has all of the information, but each of us has a little information and as the hundreds of travelers were asking each other what they thought we were supposed to do to get our luggage, together, the group of us collaborated and figured it out.

Kevin grabbed our luggage only to discover that someone else had "my same suitcase with the same red ribbon" -- and apparently they had my suitcase and I had theirs. After 10 minutes my fears were dismissed as my suitcase came around.

We rented a convertible and were off to the "most beautiful highway in the islands." The highway (H3) goes through the mountains and the tropical forest. It cost $100 million per mile to build.