Traveling to Hawaii: Day One

Our flight to Hawaii left Tampa at 6am. It was painful. Since we were traveling on frequent flier miles we didn't really get to pick much. We flew United so we pretty much had to go through Chicago O'Hare. We got into Chicage after 2.5 hours on the TED plane. Then, a two hour lay over... then... the EIGHT AND A HALF hour flight to Honolulu. It was mind numbingly boring

G and I passed the time by watching Arrested Development on DVD. Thank God for portable DVD players. When those ran out we read books, tried to stay awake, and listened to air traffic controllers on the head sets. G also played the pilot's "half way to hawaii game" where you had to guess at exactly what time we'd be half way there based on windspeed, velocity, etc. G got it right within 50 seconds ! He'd like to claim brillance, but it was mostly blind luck if you ask me. No big prize though, he was very sad.

When we finally arrived in hawaii (2pm Hawaii time) we picked up our rental car. A very nice BRAND NEW white mustang convertable. SWEET !! And, we drove to the JW Marriott Ihilani. The resort was BEAUTIFUL! We had an ocean view room on the 7th floor. HUGE room with a HUGE bathroom. The view was amazing.


We had reserved dinner that night in downtown Honolulu for a restaurant G had heard about in one of his travel magazines. The restaurant was called Town. The food was UNBELIEVEABLE! Suprisingly it was also once of the lesser expensive places we went the whole time we were there. not cheap, but so many of the places there in hawaii were just obscenely expensive. I had risotto to die for with mushrooms and asparagus. G had white fish (mahi I think) on white beans with yummy spices and other stuff...I really can't remember now but it was tasty! Dessert was a lovely panna cotta and a panini stuffed with chocolate fudge, bananas, and apple slices. SO GOOD !!

One the way back to the resort , we ran into G's parents. We chatted for like ten minutes and then excused ourselves. We were exhausted, having been up for almost 23 hours. We also had to get up early for the next day: scuba diving !!