On January 12th Mom, Camille, and I boarded a plane in Australia to fly home. As you know, you can’t time exactly when you must be at the boarding gate, but it is better to be early than late. We were there 2 hours early. I colored in my coloring book, went on my phone and laptop, and did a small bit of homework. Camille was mostly on her phone, and mom was on her laptop, but she constantly kept getting up and walking around because we were going to be sitting down on the plane for five hours. Two hours later we boarded the plane. After five very long and boring hours later of coloring, watching movies, trying to get some sleep in, and snacking, we landed in Honolulu.
It wasn’t a normal layover of two or so hours to quickly get to your next flight, it was a long eight hour layover. We had already planned to go to Pearl Harbor, but we weren’t quite sure about anything else yet. So, this is how our eight hours in Honolulu went.
We landed at around 5:30 in the morning. The first thing we did after all the security kerfuffle was deal with our luggage so we wouldn’t be lugging it around all day. Luckily, we were able to check our big duffels into the flight to Seattle. That didn’t deal with all of our luggage for we still had Camille’s guitar and all of our backpacks. Somebody had told us about airport storage so we goose chase to find it. It took a while because as you know airports are very confusing with their levels and terminals… Anyway, as soon as our backpacks and the guitar were dropped off, we searched up a place to eat breakfast and got an Uber there. We went to a pancake house that was “close” to Pearl Harbor so that we could walk there after eating. We arrived at the pancake house and ordered. Camille and I got the trio which was eggs, meat, and pancakes. Mom got fruit French toast. My mouth was watering when the food came out of the kitchen moments later. One, because I was extremely hungry, and two, because I hadn’t been to a Pancake House in so long.
Less than 30 minutes later we started walking to Pearl Harbor with full and content stomachs. Mom thought it would be a short walk from the Pancake house to Pearl Harbor but it was far from that. It took us an exhausting 30 minutes to get there in the hot sun. (Not that we weren’t used to the sun, but still.) We went from sitting on a plane for 5 hours, to stuffing ourselves with food, to walking 30 minutes to Pearl Harbor.
Back to Pearl Harbor. When we finally succeeded in walking there, we got tickets to the documentary and boat ride around the harbor. We watched the devastating documentary about the bombing and all of the boats that sank and all the people that died. After the sad documentary we climbed aboard the tour boat and heard about the frigates in the harbor and the memorial. It wasn’t exciting news to hear that we couldn’t go on the memorial because the stairs were cracked. When the boat dropped us back off at the dock we strolled around gazing at torpedoes, submarines, boats and names of people that died on different boats.
We all became tired and we had to head back to the airport anyways to catch our flight on time. We were prepared to take an Uber to the airport, but we didn’t have wifi like we did at the airport and the data on mom’s phone wasn’t working so we could couldn’t call an Uber. The good news was that there was a bus that drove to the airport and the bus stop was right up the road from Pearl Harbor. The bad news was there was only one bus to the airport. We must have just missed it because we waited about an hour before the bus came. At last it arrived. We hopped on the bus and it took off to the airport. When we got off the bus, we realized we had gotten off at the wrong terminal! We had to walk to the correct terminal. Everybody was exhausted when we boarded the plane. I was so exhausted I even fell asleep! When I woke up about an hour later, dinner was awaiting me. I looked at it and thought ew, another gross plane meal. I cookie looked delicious, (I mean you can’t go wrong with a cookie!) The potato chips were potato chips, but the sandwich looked disgusting. I opened the sandwich and took a bite expecting it to taste terrible, but it tasted delicious! It was a Hawaiian chicken sandwich. After a surprisingly good meal I tried to go back to sleep but my numerous attempts failed so I watched movies for the rest of the time.
When the plane started the decent, I had to put my laptop away, so I looked out the window and watches as the plane speed above the city lights. I was so excited to be back home and see my friends and my guinea pigs, but I was also sad to leave our adventures on Anila (the boat). My body was tired and I couldn’t wait to get a good night’s rest. The airplane landed we ambled off to the carousals to pick up our bags and get picked up by Kevin. We loaded our bags into the back of his car and then he drove us back to his house where we got a good night sleep. In the morning we all took a shower then put our stuff into our bags and drove to our friends guest house guest house. 00
When we got to the bus stop we waited for the bus. While we where waiting we saw little dogs in cages waiting to be adopted there was two, two by 3 feet cages one on top of the other. The dogs had little card board pieces to poop on and they where living in their own filth since those cardboard pieces looked like they hadn’t been changed in a while. I felt bad for the dogs.