Hawaii - Day 14 and Day 15

That was one of the longest days ever, since it was two days combined into one.  We spent one last day in Hawaii before taking an overnight flight to Vancouver.

The day started by running out to the beach for some family pictures.  After that, we returned to the resort room and I took the older three boys to the pool while Sandra packed everything up.  At checkout time we left and then drove down the road for an hour to a historical coffee farm.  They had coffee available for tasting, as well as raw macadamia nuts, which due to shipping restrictions, can only be consumed on the islands (all nuts that are shipped are roasted or cooked in some manner).  While telling us about the coffee farm, the entrance worker also drew a quick map of all the local attractions so that we would know where to go once we were done.

The farm was really fun - the guide to the farm part of the tour was funny and he kept the kids engaged as he showed us the farm, the garden and the machinery used to separate the coffee bean from the shell.  He even knew a bit about the Roughriders, since he went to Auburn and had kept track of the star quarterback when he was at school - Reggie Slack.  The farm seemed very much like the old farms here in Saskatchewan - you grew all of your own food, reused everything, there was a bounty on rat tails (instead of gopher tails) and you skipped out of school during harvest.

We then had a tour of the farm house, which amazingly enough, had been occupied until 1994 - no electricity or running water and all cooking was done over a wooden stove.  After all the tours, I really wanted to buy some coffee that was picked from the farm, but the shop was closed when we got out, as the farm closes at 2:00pm and they pretty much shut the entrance down at 1:00pm.

Armed with a map of the local attractions, we decided to skip the modern tour of a coffee farm, though I did drive over to that farm to buy some coffee.  We then drove down to the bay where Captain Cook arrived, before driving over to a Hawaiian City of Refuge national park.  The actual name is Pu'uhonua O Honaunau, which is a mouthful, even in Hawaiian.  The park contained a beach area that showed what things would have looked like back before the Europeans arrived and was a very nice walk.

Our final destination was a local Catholic church that had been painted up by one of the first priests to server in the area and was known locally as the Painted Church.  After that, we returned to the modern coffee farm so Grandma could buy some coffee and then we headed to the airport.

We dropped off the cars, somehow managed to get all of our luggage onto a shuttle bus and we were taken down to the terminal.  However, we were 4.5 hours early for our flight, and the WestJet gates did not open until 3 hours before the flight, which meant we were basically stuck on the road outside the airport with a giant pile of luggage and four children.  Luckily there was a small snack bar with picnic tables that was outside the airport, so we managed to get some questionable food and waste a couple of hours.

Then it was check in time, and sit around in the airport time.  The kids were exhausted by this point and could not wait to get on the airplane.  We finally boarded and I had Jonathan and Bradley fall asleep before we took off.  Unfortunately, at take off, Jonathan woke up because he was uncomfortable and he started screaming and kicking, but I'm pretty sure he wasn't 100% awake, so he wasn't really aware of what he was doing.  I somehow managed to pass a sleeping baby back over the seats to Sandra and got him calmed down.  The flight to Vancouver was not very fun for me, because Jonathan kept waking up every 20 minutes or so and had to be calmed down and it wasn't until past the halfway point of the flight that he had slept enough that he wasn't screaming every time he woke up.

In Vancouver everything went downhill and I was reminded how much I despise airports.  There had been strong winds over the Pacific, and all four of the WestJet flights out of Hawaii were late, meaning there were 800 people racing to get to connecting flights.  People on 8:00am or 8:30am flights had been bumped before we arrived and our flight left at 9:00am, meaning we were in a rush before the disaster that was Customs.  I foolishly checked off the checkbox that said we had goods coming that weren't with us, which meant we got bumped to a secondary screening line (which was no big deal), but because he didn't have the form we needed, we got bumped to the area where they screen all the people they aren't going to let into Canada.  That area was not busy and the workers there moved extremely slowly.  We also lost Grandma and Grandpa at this point, as they weren't allowed in this area, so it was just us, the four kids and all of our luggage.  We must have waited at the front of line for 15 minutes before a worker even showed up and once we talked to him, he disappeared for another 10 minutes to find the form we needed.  It turns out that all this form is for is to allow us to challenge the duty on the painting, since we had enough exemptions from our trip to cover it.  If I had known that before checking off the checkbox, I would have just paid the duty on the painting and had an easier time making the connecting flight.  Obviously that is what everyone else does, because the customs agents had no clue where the form even was.

After exiting Customs, there was a massive lineup to get luggage onto connecting WestJet flights, and when Sandra talked to a WestJet agent about the fact that we were on a 9:00am flight (it was currently around 8:30am), they panicked and had us run to the front of the line.  We then had to run through the Vancouver airport, which is huge, just to get to security.  We went as quickly as we could through security, though Jonathan was tired and cranky and refused to go through the scanner, so they let Sandra carry him through.  We then ran another huge way to the gate, arriving just after the final boarding call.  We got onboard, got the kids plugged in to the TV and flew to Calgary.  Luckily we did not have to change planes, so the kids just sat there watching TV while they loaded the plane back up for the short flight to Regina.

At Regina, our day was still not over, as our luggage did not make it onto the plane in Vancouver.  Unfortunately for us, a lot of oversized luggage was not loaded onto the plane in Calgary, so there were a lot of people waiting for the one baggage person to deal with them, and it was almost 2:30pm by the time we got out of the airport.  Twenty-six hours with no sleep, but we were home.  (Oh, and our luggage arrived on the 6:55pm flight out of Vancouver, so it was back at our house by bedtime.)