06- An Interesting Longest Day

Sunday

(You're meant to hear that metallic ting-ting like on "Law and Order" when you see the day-of-the-week as header)

We were at the airport with time to spare. Quite to my surprise, we found ourselves aboard an Airbus_330 instead of a Boeing_737-800.
Well, this is more like!
Makes sense, an A330, going over huge ocean expanses like a trip to Hawai`i. Reasonable of Fiji Airway, I thought. As it turned out, the A330 was only for our shorter leg to Nadi (pronounced 'Nandee'). Our stay there was not all that long. They were renovating the airport, so things looked a bit topsy-turvy... apparently, it also affected some of the air-traffic control systems, as we were delayed at least a half-hour or more before we finally found ourselves in the air over Fiji, on our way to Honolulu in...

...a Boeing 737-800.

It seemed like the longest flight of my life, even though it was only a bit over 7 hours. Did not sleep at all... Julia did, others did, I couldn't. What a relief when we finally landed on runway 4R (to my surprise... I expected 8L, for some reason).

One last hurtle: getting to our accommodations. We'd gotten through customs, gotten our bags, headed to the front of the taxi queue ... and I had to load our bags into the boot of the taxi myself, as the driver was this frail little auntie. We start driving off and she asks our destination.
"Niu Street."
"Where is Niu Street?"
"Waikiki?"

I was gobsmacked. I'd seen everything, now: a taxi driver who wanted directions to the destination. After all the weird stuff that had happened up to that point, I finally cracked... this was the last straw. I'm afraid I lost it a bit with this unfortunate ancient, who felt perfectly justified of accusing me of leading her astray because I mentioned 'Aloha Tower' - which was on the way - instead of simply saying it was the 'Hawai`ian Monarch'. I had no idea it was the 'Hawai`ian Monarch' we were meant to head for till we finally pulled up at the door.

We paid her - sans tip, I might add, "get to know your GPS, lady!" - and sat listening to techno-rock belching out from the nightclub under the 'Hawai`ian Monarch' until Julia insisted I ring this guy (who said he'd "be there" at 3:30AM) ... and did finally let us into our penthouse suite at four in the morning:

...
and so, we saw this out the window the next day!

Yeah, pretty cool, but not anywhere near as cool as finally picking up Nanny, Jackie and Derek at the airport... not the next day, but the day after.