Vacation Photos

After spending a day fighting with blogger to load photos, I went ahead and loaded them at Flickr. Here is the link to see them: Hawaii Photos, plus I have them on the sidebar.

Vacations are so hectic. My inlaws hired a limo to take us to the airport and pick us up. I'm converted. We had to be at the airport by 7 a.m., which meant we needed to leave our house by 5:30 in case we hit traffic. Ugh...I set my alarm for 4:15. Anyway, we got to the airport without incident and actually got there early. However, LAX is a totally miserable place to be. I'd managed to get all of us packed into 5 suitcases which had to be checked. United lets you print your boarding passes at home, which I did, but it does nothing to speed you up to check your bags. If you are willing to spend $2 a bag, they have curbside check in. BTW, that does not include gratuity. So we got to stand in a long line with all of our luggage and kids. Even with the check in the night before, we still had to check in anyway. So we get that done and we have to go outside the terminal and come back in through another door to go through the TSA checkpoint. You wanna have some fun? Go through this with your kids. They make you hold your own boarding pass, even if you are three. Thing had to hold her own pass. And we had to take off our shoes. I was smart and wore flip flops. But it is a major pain in the butt. Then we got to sit in the terminal for an hour waiting to board. We spent a screaming fortune on food. The airport has its own methods of terrorism.

The flight going over wasn't a nightmare although it wasn't particularly pleasant either. My son sat with a couple and their baby. His dad sat across the aisle from him. Thing sat between us (I had the window) and Diva sat behind me. Thing was obnoxious. I prayed she'd sleep but no such luck. Diva conked out, but only after spending the first half of the flight talking her seatmate's ear off. We had no leg room. I was so stiff when I got off that plane.

I'll go more into the good stuff tomorrow.