Trouble in paradise

Kevin and I celebrated our 30th wedding anniversary this July and decided to go somewhere we'd never been - Hawaii! We flew from Pittsburgh to Honolulu via Phoenix on US Airways. Eleven hours and twenty minutes is a terribly long time to spend on an airplane, but when we saw the approach to Honolulu, we knew it would be worth it.

Our first week would be spent on the island of Kauai, "The Garden Isle", so we needed to switch planes and airlines.

The first challenge we met was in Honolulu. The pilot aced the landing and taxi to the gate, but the jetway did not cooperate. After an hour of waiting for maintenance to attempt repairs, they finally decided to move to another gate. This meant we now had thirty minutes to get to our next flight.

We headed to Hawaiian Airlines to check in, which meant we had to exit the terminal. Sigh. We really hadn't thought this through. We just thought that 90 minutes would be plenty of time to get to our next flight. We didn't realize we had to go back through security to claim our bag and check in with Hawaiian.

We tried checking in at the Hawaiian Airlines self-service kiosk, but were too late.  We got in line to get reassigned. We found out that we could have checked our bags to our final destination, even if the final leg of the trip was with a different airline.

My travel tip today? Ask the airline on which you travel first to check your bags to your final destination.

It all turned out for the better, though. We were put on standby for the next flight, which was beautiful. The clouds were a luminous blanket with the sun reflecting on them. Beautiful as it was, I imagined that it wouldn't even come close to the glory of our Lord at His second coming. What an awesome moment!