Hawaii

This is us arriving in Hawaii on Sunday afternoon. We had left Washington early Friday morning and were scheduled to arrive in Honolulu around 12:30 on Friday. It didn't go as well as planned. This is our story...

When we got to the airport in Portland, they told us the flights from San Fran to Honolulu were all overbooked and that it was VERY unlikely that we'd get on. So we made the ridiculous decision to go to LA thinking that we'd get a flight out of there. CRAZY!! You'd think we'd have remembered our trip to Mazatlan some 3 years ago and our horrendous experience at LAX--after arriving and making our way to the international terminal, they informed us that our connecting flight/airline had gone out of business a month or so previous. Had Orbitz informed us of that? Did they do anything to correct it? No...., but that's another story. To make THIS story shorter, we'll just say that LAX is totally understaffed and although there WAS room on most of the flights out of L.A., the gate agents had no time (or sympathy) to allow any standby passengers on the flight.
After 3 or 4 missed flights, we decided to get a hotel. We found one on priceline.com and thought we'd get a great deal since Geof.'s dad had been upgraded from a 2 star to a 31/2 star in Houston just the day before. We didn't find a 2 star in L.A. for what we bid on, so ignorantly, we gambled on what we could get with a 1 star. And a 1 star is exactly what we got. Scary!! Here we are pulling our roller bags around a seedy part of L.A. looking much out of place. Our room was just as scary as something out of a movie. You know, the places where drug deals are made? That's what it was like. Our pic of Geof. on the bed doesn't even give you the full effect. We couldn't believe our luck. No upgrade at all! (;

I forgot to mention that they didn't even have a shuttle to their hotel (even though we'd typed in LAX when searching for a hotel). We had to take the city bus. We're not opposed to riding the bus at all...but couldn't believe the time it took us to get to a hotel 3 miles away.

Day 2 in L.A. No, we didn't get a flight to Honolulu that day either. More details to follow...