unsystematic

02 Jan 2010

Holiday in Hawaii, Day 1

Some of you may know, but my parents live in Hawaii. Actually, my entire immediate family lives in Hawaii, brothers, sisters, mom and dad. My dad got stationed there and wants Hawaii to be his big final duty station, but he also got my brother stationed there as his first duty station. This past holiday was the first time they’d all be together, back from War and travelling and I couldn’t pass up the opportunity to take a trip out. It would be the first time in five years the entire family would be together for the holidays and about a year and a half or two years since I’d even seen my family at all.

I started ticket shopping back in April, hoping to book early and get good rates, which I did. I found a round-trip, direct flight from Atlanta to Honolulu for well under a grand. That was the easy part. The hard part was waiting for the trip which would be my very first trip to Hawaii.

Familiar with the time difference I scheduled my flights to put me there fairly early in the day and leave fairly late in the evening. I only had seven days and if two were going to be spent flying, I wanted to at least be able to glean as much time from those two days as I could.

I left Atlanta at 10:50am and landed in Honolulu at 3:27pm. Funny how that works, right? That gave me a really good portion of the day to hang with family. My grandparents from New York were there visiting too so it was really nice. They all met me at the airport and welcomed me with a lei made of kukui nuts (the nut from the Hawaiian state tree).

We left the airport and headed for my parents house which was only 20 minutes away, but with the heavy city traffic it took us about 45 minutes. I was grateful though because I wanted to see as much as I could of the scenery and stuff.

I’ll write more on the scenery later because I wasn’t focused on getting pictures this first day knowing there’d be plenty of time for that later.

We got to my parents house and they gave me the big tour. They live in brand new military housing and I gotta tell you, housing for the military has come a long way since when I was a little kid. Houses are so nice now!

My parents house is a 2,200 square foot, two-story home with privacy fencing in the back and a detached garage. All of the homes here have solar panels on the roof to help with electricity which I thought was pretty cool, and appropriate for a place that has an abundance of sunshine every day year round.

After the tour my dad did his customary “shot” in which we all took a shot of something. I chose Crown Royale which is my dad’s favorite drink. Then, we grabbed a beer and headed to the front porch to catch up a bit.

The shaka in Hawaii has several meanings. It could mean hello, have a great day, or be an agreement like “right on” or something similar. We drank a few beers then headed inside when it got dark to chill in the living room while mom cooked dinner. Several beers later and severely jet-lagged I was sleepy. I bid my farewells for the night, appologizing for my early bedtime and went upstairs to pass out.

Day 1 was really awesome and I was very much looking forward to day 2, which would be full of beaches and more scenery.