Our First 24 Hours in Paradise

Well, we finally arrived in Kona at 1:00 AM. We slept most of the way from San Francisco, but we certainly were tired when we got off the plane. Off to the Thrifty Rent A Car building to pick up our car. Many thanks to Thrifty because the clerk learned the four of us had 7 pieces of luggage, she upgraded us to a Dodge Caravan. That was great!

The van came with a simple GPS navigation system, so we had no problem making our way from the airport to our vacation rental in Keauhou - just south of Kona - even at 2:00 in the morning. A quick unpacking of our suitcases, and we went to sleep. 29 hours after we woke up in Winnipeg.

Saturday morning we woke up and headed to check out our corner of paradise. Here are Tim and Jody on the lanai:

And here are Dona and Tim in the dining room:

Temperatures when we woke up in the morning were +20C, with a forecast of sunny and +29C that day. Ah yes.

We had breakfast at Sam Choy's, a restaurant close to our house with a magnificent view of the ocean. Way off in the distance we could see a couple pods of humpback whales, playfully flapping their tails on the surface. Here's Jody taking a picture just outside the restaurant;

We headed into Kona, did some shopping, and stopped at the dive shop (Big Island Divers) to book our dives. We stopped to sample some Kona coffee at a little coffee shop, and stumbled on the Kona Inn, with a beautiful view of the ocean:

We stopped at the farmers market to pick up some fresh produce, and bought our groceries. $5.47 for a four-litre jug of milk, $25/kg for top sirloin steak. Yeah we knew Hawaii would be expensive for food. But the pineapple! It had to have been picked just that morning. It was so sweet and fresh. Wow!

We had a barbecued steak dinner back at the house, and enjoyed the company of our friends. This place is amazing!

Day 1: Traveling to Kona

Today is the day! Our flight left Winnipeg at 6:00 AM, meaning we had to be at the airport to check in at 4:00 AM. We were so excited we could barely sleep, so as it was we woke up just after 2:00 AM. 

Got into Chicago at 8:30AM.

This place sure got a lot of snow earlier this week. We saw a lot of it piled up beside the taxiways.

The building architecture of Chicago O'Hare is impressive. The use of open steel structures is really neat:

So we hung out in the United Club Lounge while waiting for our next flight. Our departing flight for San Francisco was delayed a couple times due to the rain storms in the Bay Area. We didn't depart until two and a half hours after our scheduled departure time. Our concern was that would use up our entire layover time in San Francisco, and we'd risk missing our connection.

As it turned out, our connecting flight from San Francisco was delayed by 8 minutes to allow connecting passengers (us) to catch the plane. Then it was delayed another two hours so a flight crew could arrive. Those rains storms in the Bay sure played havoc with flight schedules.

I have to give full credit to United Airlines for the way they kept us informed of the delays. As soon as a new departure time was entered into their system, we got text messages and notifications in the United App informing us of the delay. With WiFi on board many domestic US flights, it was easy to check on the status of our flights.

Found a Boudin's bakery in the airport and introduced Tim & Jody to San Francisco's famous clam chowder in a sourdough bread bowl. Mmmmm good!

So here's us hanging out in Terminal 3 in San Francisco, waiting for our fought to Kona: 

At this moment (7:30 PM) we're sitting in our seats waiting for a flight crew and new cabin crew to arrive. Now they're estimating an 8:00 PM departure, which after a six-hour flight will get us in to Kona just after midnight. Which will be 4:00 AM Winnipeg time. We'll have been up for more than 26 hours by the time we get to the beach house. Road warriors we are.