March 8, at the Halona Blowhole Lookout in Oʻahu.
Hawaii, 2025
February 28th - Getting to Honolulu

Here we go! We left Rochester early in the morning on Friday, February 28th and headed up to the Minneapolis airport to begin our journey. Our four-hour flight to Los Angeles left at 7:00 AM and, due to the time zone differences, arrived in L.A. just a little after 9:00 AM. After a four hour layover, we left L.A. around 1:45 PM and arrived in Honolulu just before 6:00 PM that evening (about a 6-hour flight), allowing us to check into the Vive Hotel Waikiki, get settled in, do a little exploring.

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At 4:00 AM, we picked up Teresa and Steve, loaded their bags into our CR-V, and headed up to MSP, the Minneapolis/St. Paul International Airport. It was too dark to take a good photo of all of us, so this had to do. Off we went on the little over an hour ride to the EZ-Air Park off-site airport parking lot where we'd leave the car while on our cruise.

We easily glided through check-in, bag check, and security, and before we knew it, we boarded the plane for our flight to L.A. around 7:00 AM. We always wear masks when flying.

Lucky for me, one of my favorite movies was available as an in-flight movie. "Les Miserables," a more than 2½ hour-long movie, kept me occupied for a good portion of the flight.

After landing in L.A., we walked around LAX (Los Angeles International Airport) looking for someplace to eat lunch, we noticed how busy (0:27) it was. It was hypnotizing watching the people on a lower level as they proceeded through the maze leading towards their security checkpoint.

It was around 10:30 AM L.A. time (12:30 PM our time, time to eat!) when we finally found a food court and settled in for lunch, Mei-O and I sharing a 3-entree meal from Panda Express.

After lunch, we made our way to Gate 32A where we just sat and waited to board (so tired from waking up so early!)

And by 1:15 PM, we were on board, ready and anxious to be on our way to Honolulu!

Cruising along at 30-some thousand feet, we were served our in-light meal. With several choices, I chose what I pretty much always choose (although I usually have a Coke.) This flight, I passed the time watching another long movie (over 3 hours), one I've never seen before but always wanted to, "Lawrence of Arabia."

Right around 5:40 PM Honolulu time, we touched down, about 6 hours after leaving L.A. Both our flights were smooth and quite comfortable.

Walking out of the terminal, we immediately got a taste of the tropical island we were now on. Now we needed to call an Uber or Lyft to get us to the Vive (rhymes with "five") Hotel Waikiki.
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