Hawaii - Day One

In an attempt to give you all the pertinent details of our trip I've decided to do separate posts for each day of our trip.


We left our house last Sunday at 4:15 a.m. and headed for the airport knowing it was going to be a long day of travel. Our flight from Bloomington to Chicago was on time and after boarding the plane Lili became antsy. I was concerned that we were in for a very long day of travel. However, once the plane took off down the runway her entire body began to relax and she was asleep within about 5 minutes. She didn't wake up until we stood up to exit the plane in Chicago. Maybe things would go well after all.


Since we had a couple hours before our next flight, we were able to sit down and enjoy some breakfast at the O'Hare airport and then headed over to the terminal so Lili could run off some energy before our next flight. I'm not quite sure how the other passengers felt about her running around, but I can honestly say I didn't care. I wanted her to be as worn out as possible for the flight from Chicago to LA.

Our flight from Chicago was on time and Lili did awesome. She watched some Elmo on the portable DVD player we brought with us and then fell asleep for a couple hours not waking up until shortly before we began our descent into LAX. The pilot had even managed to get us there 20 minutes early turning our 4 hour and 40 minute lay-over into a 5 hour lay-over. Fortunately, my sister lives in S. Cal so she, along with her husband and one of their daughters picked us up for a few hours of California sunshine. We had lunch at California Pizza Kitchen then spent some time outside at one of the many outdoor malls enjoying the sun and Starbucks. We sat by a fountain outside of Starbucks where Uncle Ron taught Lili how to throw pennies into the fountain.

After our LA outing we headed back to the airport for our next flight. Again, the flight was on time, but since it was the longest leg of our journey we just weren't looking forward to this part of the trip. Lili fell asleep for a couple hours on this flight as well, enjoyed some Elmo and climbing up and down off the seats. I can honestly say that she did better on the flight than Dave and I did.

We made it to our final destination, Kauai. Unfortunately, it was almost 9:00 p.m. and dark so we couldn't enjoy any of the sights. However, it didn't deter the bus driver from playing tour guide and pointing out the sights along the way. LOL!!!! For a matter-of-fact, he would point something out by first saying, "You can't see it because it's dark, but here is the ......." It was hilarious.

We made it to the hotel around 9:30 and proceeded through the various lines of check in. Because this was a company sponsored event there were a lot of details to take care of, which meant there were several lines we had to stand in, but it was definitely a well oiled machine. First we got our hotel room taken care of, then we signed forms for our activity that week, got some money for meals (bonus), were allowed to pick out Hawaiian shirts for our trip and then made our way into the ballroom where they had tables of food set up for us.

After we put some food in our tummies, we made our way to our room. First, let me say that this hotel is "HUGE" but we didn't know just how big until the next day when we could actually see everything. We did have a good idea though based on the fact that it took us somewhere between 4 and 5 mintues to get to our room from the elevator. The walk was well worth the wait though. The room was large and the bathroom was about as big as some hotel rooms I've stayed in before :-)

That's it for Day 1 of our Hawaii trip. Please visit again soon for our Day 2 adventures along with many more photos.