... and so it begins.

We got up early to get ready for our afternoon flight. Because we were worried about the combined Christmas break rush and rush hour traffic, I figured that we should head for the airport around eight: more than five hours before our flight was to depart! Of course plans never seemed to get followed in our neck of the woods and we got out closer to nine.

Our fears were unwarranted when we arrived at the airport. Apart from the fact that traffic was fairly light on the roads, the airport itself was pretty much empty when we got there. We got through security and customs so quickly that I thought that nobody was traveling that day. Finding our gate (C24) was easy too: It was right in front of the security gates.

Me at gate C24.

So we had over three hours to kill.

Maggie with a few hours to kill.

The extra sleep would have been nice, but it did not really matter: We were on vacation!

Viewing the Rockies from the air.

The flight out was fairly uneventful, and it was even less eventful in Vancouver. There was basically nobody at customs, and this was in the late afternoon (local time). I would have thought that the airport would have been crawling with parents and their kids who have just been let out of school!

The last leg to Maui was also uneventful but we landed on time, which was basically near midnight. I was a little worried about driving in a foreign land with a foreign car in the middle of the night, but having studied the maps, and having a (semi-useful) GPS made the drive easy enough. The drive in the dark was quite interesting - it was much darker here than it would ever be in the city, especially since a lot of the roads did not have any street lights.

I also had fun trying to pronounce the street names. I used my best Magnus impersonation.

We were greeted by Jean, Jeff, and Marie when we arrived at the condo and they helped us carry our luggage up to our room. What surprised me the most about the building was the lack of walls and glass windows! Everything was so exposed to the elements. We were planning on getting up for six in the morning the next day so that we could go on the road to Hana, but considering how little sleep we got, I was finding that getting up that early might be a little too difficult..