Homeward Bound

After we left our last Port of Call for the return to Honolulu, we cruised by the North shore of Kauai. Easy to see why there are no roads through this area!

We sailed overnight and arrived at Honolulu early in the morning.  NCL booted everyone off the ship by 8:40AM.  We managed to hurry through one last breakfast, then lined up to disembark.  There followed some milling-about with 2,000 other passengers in the vast Honolulu reception hall, looking for our luggage.  Once that was located, we lined up for our prepaid transfer by bus to the airport.  We had contemplated renting a car and wandering around Honolulu (our flight didn’t leave till 8:45PM) but it was raining and we’d already accumulated nearly a week of Honolulu time, virtually exhausting its charms.

An hour and a half later, we boarded a bus for the short ride to the airport.  Our check-in bags had to pass through Agricultural screening, then we found Alaskan Airlines and were expeditiously hustled through the check-in procedure.  That was followed by the ubiquitous security check where Reg’s Pre-Check boarding pass could not be scanned for some reason, so once again we were separated and saved no time, really.  All that still only took 30 minutes, so we arrived at the gate with 10 hours to spare, pulled out the Kindles and settled in.

Airlines!  Do us all a favour and enforce your own rules about Carry-On luggage.  Everyone is supposed to be entitled to one modest bag and one small personal item (purse,  or a computer or camera bag, not a duffel bag).  Many people embarked with three or even four bags of one description or another and a great many of them would never have fit into the gauge designed to determine if your bag was eligible for carry-on.  Lets face it; if they arrive at the gate with a luggage-cart full of their luggage, it is no longer “carry on”.

The lack of attention by airlines means that some of the selfish people on board are taking storage space meant for two or three of their fellow travelers.  Not to mention the delays in getting on and off the aircraft while these morons stow their excess bags and recover them in an infuriatingly slow way on landing.  This only enrages all the rest of us and does not in any way endear the airline to us.  You are annoying the majority of your passengers in order to accommodate a lazy, selfish minority of your thoughtless and cheap (they should check their excess bags, even if they have to pay for it) ones.  The man-hours wasted by a hundred passengers while these selfish, redneck buffoons fumble with their bags far exceeds the 20 minutes they personally might have saved by not checking their bags.  Do something!  Air travel is aggravating enough without unnecessary irritations like this.

Our flight to Seattle arrived 35 minutes late because of headwinds.  They turned to our advantage on the return though, as they became tail-winds and we landed 20 minutes ahead of the originally scheduled time, making up nearly an hour on the West to East flight.

Four hours of worrying about eastern snowstorms later, we took off again, landing in Newark 40 minutes early due to continuing strong winds.  Clocks indicated that we’d been up for 36 hours, so after chatting briefly with Stefan and family, we crashed for the night.