(more and higher resolution photos here)

A week before we’d left for Hawaii Go! airlines had cancelled our original flight from Lihue to Honolulu (to connect with our flight in Honolulu to Los Angeles).  So, we had to book an earlier flight out of Lihue, which, by the way, is a place where all time stops, apparently.

This meant leaving our hotel in Kauai early, which were sad about, and having a long (five hours) layover at the tiny Honolulu airport.

On the way in I snapped a shot of Electric Beach from the air:

Luckily a few days earlier Sam’s friend Yen had reached out and offered to take us to lunch on our layover in Honolulu.

We went to lunch at Bogart’s, which has really great omelettes, but is jam packed (Sunday brunch) and anything other than a granola bowl can take a long time.

After lunch we still had about an hour so Yen took us up to Round Top Forest Reserve lookout for a more than 180 degree view above the city.

Stopping on the road up:

After that she drove us through ChinaTown and the Punchbowl cemetary before heading back to the airport.

Once at the airport we received a piece of paper from our airline stating they may divert our flight once in the air to Las Vegas because of “Los Angeles weather patterns.”  The scary thing was that the airline claimed to have no responsibility for what would happen to us in Las Vegas and we might be stuck waiting for a flight to LA for a considerable amount of time.  Luckily when we were all boarded the pilot said this was essentially a crock and we’d be going to LA for sure.   Of course, he didn’t say when, as we had to wait on the tarmac for an hour for some “paperwork” to be found.  This got us home later than expected and it was after 1am before we finally got to bed.  Not the best way to end a vacation, but that’s what we got for booking cheap flights…. otherwise we wouldn’t have made it to Hawaii in the first place.