Saturday, January 19, 2013

Hawaii Vacation

This Hawaii vacation was our Christmas, we went in January after the holidays as prices were a bit cheaper.  Our travel agent booked us a two bedroom condo, which was cheaper than getting two hotel rooms.  It was very nice and we loved our week on condo living.

We left Billings bright and early on Jan 5, our flight was supposed to leave at 6:00 am.  We were booked on Alaska Airlines which Jennifer didn't like due to her problems on her Korea trip last spring.  I had signed up for alerts on our flight and did get one at 3:00 am stating that our flight was delayed out of Billings for 30 minutes.  No problem because we had a 90 minute layover in Seattle.  As it turned out, our flight was an hour late leaving Billings.  We did land in Seattle and had about 30 minutes to catch our connecting flight to Honolulu.  We arrived at the gate just as they started boarding the plane. As we got to the ticket agent, there was a problem with our boarding passes, we had to go to a customer service counter.  Turned out that Billings had removed us off this flight and changed us to a flight that wouldn't leave Seattle until 6:30 pm, which got us into Honolulu at midnight.  Fortunately the lady was able to get us seats on the plane but we weren't together, scattered all over the plane.  Made a very boring 5 1/2 hour flight to Honolulu but we got there.  Even the lady at the counter didn't understand why Billings did what they did.  We vowed that we would never fly Alaska Airlines again, but we should never say never.

As we got off the plane we were met at the gate by the shuttle service and we all received a lei and had a sign with our name on it.  We received a coupon for a free breakfast on Sunday morning through the company and we would get some deals on tours and other information about the islands. 

Got checked into the condo then we walked around Waikiki to get our bearings, we were tired after our stressful day so just relaxed a bit.  We ate a late supper then to bed early.

I will blog about all of our adventures later.  Sure did enjoy ourselves, didn't take long to get accustomed to the 80 degree weather and now we are trying to figure out how to go back again.

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