NEOCOT

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Well, our ride to the airport vanished in a cloud of dust when some cop thing took our limo with the wire screen and the chauffer away at the last minute.  Elen, his wife, offered to take us in her pickup.  I declined because I would have had to share the pickup bed with the luggage and their German Shepard who has big teeth.  We ended up taking our car to the airport long term parking. Ugh. 
 
The shuttle bus took us to a point about 30 feet from the curbside check.  We were quickly checked in at the side of the curb. Then we went to the counter to have our bad window seat changed to a nice aisle seat way up front in row 12.  The girl who had the window seat there was very small and we could peak past her and see things like farms, plains, and the Rockies.  The driver of the plane announced when we were over Denver and we tried to wave to our daughter who lives near there.  The Rockies were pretty snow covered and seemed to go on forever.  Then it was a glimpse of lesser mountains in Utah and Nevada before the final peaks in California, no more snow.  The landing at San Francisco was pretty smooth, as far as I could tell, and we got off the plane to stretch our legs and call our kids. That flight was about 4 hours and 15 minutes. 
 
We didn’t eat there since I had read someplace that ATA would feed us for free on the Hawaii leg.  They would have fed us on the San Fran leg for five bucks for a puny little snack.  We ate our Costco fruit and ATA’s little bag of pretzels.  Sure enough, shortly after leaving San Francisco the food cart came down the aisle with some pasta delight and a gooey chicken thing.  We ate gooey chicken, noodles, and a few veggies.  The people who took the flight from San Francisco were mostly a new group with only a few recognizable faces.   
 
I failed to mention the nasty Scrabble game on the first leg which I lost by over 100 points.  Needless to say, I read almost the whole way on the second leg.  Another failure was my not mentioning the movie on the first leg.  They sold or rented earplugs if you wanted to hear it.  It was all free on the second leg.  Maybe the $228 fare, that’s per person, one way from Ind to Hnl, was split into $28 for the first leg and $200 for the second leg.  You gotta make enough for those free earphones.
 
It was dark when we landed in Honolulu.  The baggage claim area was a very long walk from the plane, but we beat our bags there by about 10 minutes.  We called the Best Western after collecting our stuff and they sent their shuttle to pick us up.  It only took a few minutes and the ride to the hotel was even quicker.  Our room is on the 11th floor and there is an ocean view.  It is several miles away; on the other side of the airport, but it is there.  I can tell it is the ocean because it is blue and I saw a big ship that looked like a naval ship of some kind.  I think it must have been heading into Pearl Harbor.  Even closer there is some expressway we can look down onto.  The traffic isn’t as bad as our I-465 but there is enough that the sounds lull you to sleep.         

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