There really isn't a whole lot to say about this day. We spent most of it in flight. We touched down in Los Angeles at the halfway point. It was strange to be so close to family yet unable to visit them.
By the time we got to the Big Island, it was about 3am our time and around 9pm Hawaii time. We arrived at the Kona airport exhausted yet excited. I wore a plastic flower clip in my hair for the occasion. The Kona airport is a very interesting place. It is made up entirely of outdoor pavillions and has no true indoors to speak of! We were definitely not on the mainland anymore! The night air felt nice and warm. There were pretty statues in the courtyard and Hawaiian music playing in the background. The words aloha and mahalo (thank you) peppered every conversation.
We had reserved a shuttle service to take us to the hotel. Our driver had on one of those Hawaiian shirts. We discovered that the people of Hawaii really did seem to love wearing Hawaiian print shirts and dresses, and women of all ages had flowers in their hair. The driver was very kind and chatty. We discovered that he and many others we'd met later were transplants and not originally from the islands.
Since night had already fallen, there wasn't much to see along the way. Hawaii has a lot of rules to prevent too much light pollution. The street lamps are all yellow and angled downward making it very dark- glad I wasn't the one driving!
Our hotel for the first few nights was the Hilton Waikola. Derek had stayed there on his previous visit and liked it. Like the Kona airport, the resort was very open. They must not get a lot of rain there. You enter the main lobby, and it looks as if you are going into a building except the fourth wall is missing, and the room extends into the outside.
The resort was so big, they had a little tram to take you to each building. We noticed with amusement that here, the default language was not Spanish as in Florida, but rather Japanese! We saw a number of Japanese families on vacation, and Japanese translations were on everything.
Our room was, naturally, all the way on the end. The trams were so slow that had we not been exhausted and carrying large suitcases, we would have walked.
We pretty much crashed once we got to our room. The room was lovely though- nice and big with a couch and a coffee table and our own balcony over-looking the ocean. I couldn't wait to see what the place looked like in daylight.
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