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Published: December 16th 2006
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The pool
Jane and Lauren in the pool, if you can't get them out...join them. This is the longest day of our holidays…due maily to traveling over the dateline. The first 20 hours of today were fine…wake up, eat, pool, eat, pool, eat, beach, eat, walk, drink. We met up with a couple from the UK doing a Pacific jaunt of several months - I spotted his HDD HD cam and had to check it out. I found out earlier today that my camcorder doesn’t record the AV input from the helmet cam I bought…it will only pass it through to the firewire out…not very useful, so looks like I’m up for a new camcorder if it is to work for me. Kerching!
2 out of 3 IS BAD!
Then 8pm hit…the private car transfer due to pick us up didn’t show up. Phone calls were made, lots of serious faces, and finally they let us know that they had forgotten about us! Flash back 48 hours prior and we had a similar incident waiting for a cab to take us to Tullamarine…after a significant wait, we rang to check up on our ride to find out that apparently we had been picked up and dropped off already! 3 cab rides…2 stuff ups!
Tough Life
What more can you say? This taxi stuff-up nearly cost us dearly as we were so late getting to the airport they were not going to let us on the plane as it was overloaded! They had downgraded our flight from a 747 to a 737 and hoped to stuff the same amount of cargo on it and get it off the ground! Fortunately after a short wait, they waved us up and let us on.
Look Ma! My luggage is glowing!
Flying should now come with a new warning….it will make you glow. I think we’ve been scanned and our luggage x-rayed so much that it has developed a half life! We were scanned just once in Melbourne…that’s OK…we got scanned and x-rayed twice in Fiji…pushing it a bit….then came Honolulu.
Operation Overkill
I think the US are now combating terrorism by submitting travelers to mind-numbing stupidity of the grandest scale. Keep in mind, we were only TRANSIT passengers on our way to Vancouver and had no intention of entering the US, yet we still had to fill out immigration entry and customs forms. The customs form is 1 per family which is nice, but the immigration forms made me
Coconut Juice 1
We bumped into this guy cutting down coconuts from the trees and asked him nicely if we could try the juice as Jane had never had any before. doubt my will to live about half way through filling out the second one. Each form requires your birthdate copied in FOUR different locations. I liked the bit about the address I’d be staying at while in the US…unfortunately TomTom couldn’t give me the street address for Honolulu Airport so I gave up and wrote “TRANSIT”. So we had to clear customs and immigration and enter the US and then turn around and head back into the terminal and check in all over again! I should be thankful that we didn’t have to collect our luggage and re-check it back in again…apparently you had to do that a little while ago, but it just took too long!
But armed with this information, I think I’ll make an assault on those nearby geocaches when we come back through on the return journey.
Crank it up!
The metal detectors you walk through have been turned up to maximum sensitivity in Honolulu. It was able to detect the extra iron in my body from that juicy steak I had for dinner…well, not quite…but it’s the first time Jane has managed to set one off with her titanium hip!
Vancouver
We arrived in Vancouver without too much problem after all that. Couple of where are you goings and have a nice trip. We couldn't find the fixed price limo service - no-one around, so we were bundled into a new hybrid cab - back seat only as all our luggage took up all the boot space and front seat. I fired up the GPS and provided updates to when we expected to arrive at our hotel to the nearest minute. The taxi fare ended up a little over the maximum fare suggested from the airport, but not bad considering that it was peak hour on a Friday night in downtown Vancouver.
We arrived at the hotel to find that they'd upgraded us to the "Tower" rooms at no extra charge and gave us the webcam view that we'd been watching for so many weeks leading up to now. I felt guilty that I had no small change to tip the doorman...though I've fixed that and now have a pocket full of jingling stuff and $5 notes for just these awkward occasions. There's apparently a lot of free WiFi spots around town and I can pick up no fewer
Ocean View Rooms
All was deserted down this end of the resort. than 15 networks from the hotel room, but I splashed on the C$15 for 24 hours access as I have a load to download and publish and I'll probably use Skype to get online and make cheap calls tomorrow.
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Jennifer
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moose ~ ~ ~
hey Roger, i enjoy reading your blog! can't wait to see the pictures that you are going to post for nxt couple of weeks. :D hey if you do have the chance, please do take a picture of a real live MOOSE... PPPLLLSSS?? Enjoy your trip!! :D