airports — 2016 — The 21st Century Matriarch

To wrap up the posts about my trip in December to Hawaii – I am noting some lessons learned from the trip --- what did I learn from this trip that I will apply to trips in the future:

Have a contingency for much longer flights than planned. This could include a change of clothes and must-have toiletries in carry-on luggage, medications and refillable water bottle, and healthy snacks. I’ve discovered that peppermint lifesavers help me feel better even when I am very tired. Most of my healthy snacks are pita bread wedges, veggies (celery, carrots, cucumber), fruit (apple, pear), nuts, and protein bars.

Planning a trip to a place you’ve never been before is best done with someone that has been there before…and recently. The Hawaii trip was enhanced by my daughter’s previous trip to some of the same places on a geology field trip. It helped that she was there with us too.

Look at brochures for local attractions. We saw the 2400 Fahrenheit brochure in our vacation rental; it was about a mile away! Sometimes the unplanned is icing on top for a vacation.

Seek out local food. The foods with purple sweet potato were the theme for this trip for me: pie and pastries. And I enjoyed eating at the Kona Brewing company twice! I followed my daughter’s suggestion and tried the Black Sand Island Porter.

Maximize variety. There were so many ‘high points’ for this vacation: water falls, helicopter, telescopes, volcanos, tropical forest, unusual sand, geology…..overall the variety and ‘first time’ aspect of so much of that variety is what made the trip to Hawaii so spectacular.

Avoid overeating. We feel better when we eat out less and we eat less when we prepare it ourselves! In Hawaii we ate the majority of our meals at the vacation rental (that had a full kitchen) or as picnics that we prepared and took with us for our meal at mid-day. Over the past few years, we’ve done this more frequently and now we have made it our ‘normal.’

Don’t leave valuables in the car. We didn’t have anything stolen but some fellow tourists did at one of the state parks. That kind of thing can ruin a vacation. Sometimes it is hard to not have valuables in the car. On the day we left we had to pack the car and leave our vacation rental by 11 AM and we didn’t need to be at the airport for many hours….so everything was in the car. Most of the places we went were places where there were more people around – where someone breaking into a car would be noticeable…maybe.

Take time to savor the place – while you are there and when you get back. I tried to review my pictures each evening while I was in Hawaii and then writing the blog posts was a good way to enjoy what we did all over again.

Previous Hawaii Posts:

It was always going to be a long flight from Hawaii back home to Maryland. Our plan was to begin in the evening and try to sleep through as much of it as possible.

But the plan fell apart almost immediately. Our fight from Kona was delayed from 10:15 PM on a Sunday to Monday at 6:30 AM. We stood in a long slow line to get out larger bags checked and a voucher for a hotel room and transportation to/from the airportt – even though it would only be for a few hours. The Kona airport is open air and the wooden benches in the waiting areas have unmovable armrests (i.e. very few places to actually lay down and try to sleep in the damp and cool night). The Royal Kona Resort voucher gave us the ability to shower and change clothes which helped us feel a little better; we only got about90 minutes of sleep!

When we got back to the airport early the next morning, we discovered that the art glass we had purchased (nicely wrapped in bubble wrap in my husband’s carry on) had to be hand inspected by TSA. It was good that there was not much of a line. They managed to preserve most of the bubble wrap and re-taped the package. As we got to the waiting area, we discovered that about half the passengers from our flight had spent the night in the airport; evidently there was some confusion by the airline personnel re vouchers. Aargh! I felt very sorry for the rumpled and sleep deprived people.

The airline brought in donuts and granola bars for breakfast….and then we waited for the plane to be ready to board. We got off later than planned so that everyone missed their connecting flights in Los Angeles – including us. That made the second time the planned trek home had to be modified. The airline had rescheduled us onto another airline’s flight into Dulles – and our car was in the parking garage at BWI. After a little haggling – we were provided a voucher for transportation from Dulles to BWI. We had time for a regular meal in the Los Angeles Airport before catching our cross-country flight.

The biggest miracle of the trek home: our luggage that had originally been checked to go to BWI arrived at Dulles with us in the wee hours of Tuesday morning. By that point our biological clocks were totally confused having gotten no solid sleep for over 40 hours. We got home and slept a few hours then go up to ratchet ourselves back toward Eastern Standard Time. It took us several days to recover!

Previous Hawaii Posts: