Day 1

We finally made it to Hawaii!



Our day started out at 4:00 AM, as we had to be at the ICT airport for our first flight at 6:35 AM. We got to Denver with no problems. We had a three hour layover, so I just watched four episodes of Avatar on my iPod while Ashley napped in a chair. We grabbed some McDonald's breakfast right before our flight to Los Angeles. And then, the drama began.

Now, when we got our boarding passes back at the ICT airport, we did not get ones for LAX to HNL. When we arrived in LAX, we had two hours until our next flight, so we went to the gate and asked if we could get our boarding passes there. The man told me "Yes, but not until an hour before the flight." So we waited until then, and we started lining up with everyone else in front of the counter. Then after awhile they announced that they will not be giving boarding passes for another half hour, so they told everyone to sit down.

About a half hour before the plane was scheduled to leave, we started lining up again to get our boarding passes. We saw that there was another line of people who already had their boarding passes. Soon they announced that they would start boarding, but we still didn't have boarding passes! We started feeling uneasy about our current situation and Ashley was sort of freaking out. The lady at the counter was in the process of calling out passenger's names a few at a time to hand out boarding passes and most of the other passenger's had already boarded by the time they called Ashley's name. When we went up there, Ashley got her pass but then they were saying that they didn't have any seats left. Apparently they had overbooked and there were still quite a few people who still were waiting to get on the flight. They told Ashley to go ahead and get on the plane, but she told them she wasn't going to leave without me. So, she gave up her seat so that we could catch the next flight to Honolulu. They offered us free round-trip tickets to anywhere in the continental U.S. as compensation and gave us tickets for the American Airlines Honolulu flight leaving in two hours.

Ashley felt a little better after that since she was excited about the free tickets. We called my brother Aaron in Hawaii to let him know we would be coming in later than expected as we headed from the United Airlines terminal to American Airlines. We had to go through this long, empty, ominous hallway to get from one terminal to the other. It was kind of creepy since there was no on else in there. Of course we had to go through airport security again after we got our new tickets, then we waited for about another 2 hours before they changed the gate on us. Once we went to the new gate, they announced that they had to change planes, so everyone had to get new boarding passes for new seating assignments. At this point, we were starting to wonder if we would ever get to Honolulu, but we did get our boarding passes this time and eventually made the long journey to Hawaii.

The flight wasn't too bad, but since we came in later than anticipated, it was already dark when we arrived, so we didn't get to experience any cool sights on the first day. Aaron met us in baggage claim and gave us awesome leis. We had to go to the United baggage claim since our suitcases had gone before us, but that was easy since our bags were right there waiting for us.

Aaron drove us back to his apartment and he made us chicken and rice with mashed potatoes for dinner. It was delicious! After that we promptly went to bed after a long day of travel.