Our Honeymoon in Hawaii, part 1

So it has been awhile since I have wrote, but one of my excuses is that I was on my honeymoon with Geofford in Hawaii! Overall, the honeymoon was a lot of fun, but it started really poorly. Read on if you are interested. If not, I will post our pictures soon.

We had booked our whole package through expedia and this included both our flight and our accomodations. In hindsight, I am going to try and fly Air Canada whenever I can because then you actually know what you are going to get. We were scheduled to fly on American Airlines from Ottawa to Chicago and then from Chicago straight to Honolulu arriving at 2:30 local time. Seems pretty easy right? Well, we had a 6am flight out of the Ottawa airport, so we dutifully arrived at 4am, after not sleeping all night, because there was no real point. As we arrived to the gate, my cell phone rang. It was American Airlines informing me that the 6am flight to Chicago was CANCELLED (please look at the photo to the left, which is a photo of the departures at 4:03am which states that the 6:00am flight to Chicago was on time), and we were booked on the 12:30 flight to Chicago instead, and since we weren't going to make our connection to Honolulu, they changed our connection to go to Los Angeles and then to Honolulu, putting us in Honolulu for 9:55 local time. Obviously we were very disappointed and confused because neither of us had sleep since the night before, so we went to ask the ticketing agent, and she was really rude and said that there was nothing that she could do because we were on the 12:30 flight. Meanwhile, other people in line seemed to be able to do something because they were able to go through customs. We called expedia to see if we could be reimbursed if we took a cab home and then back because part of our package included travel insurance which included trip delay, if your trip was delayed more than 6 hours, which our trip was. After a few hangups on the other end, we finally got through to an agent who put us through to the insurance people, who told us that we may not be able to get reimbursed, because the delay has to be out of province or something like that. What?!? I think that the agent felt sorry for us because she did open a claim for us, but did insist that we may not be reimbursed for our expenses. As we were already spending a lot for this trip, we decided to stay at the airport, as would only be another 4 hours before we get through the gate, which at the time didn't seem that bad.

As the line had dwindled at American, we decided to ask why other people were able to go through customs, and just to see if we could do. The lady there was super rude and just explained that we couldn't go through because of US Customs rules that you couldn't wait in the waiting room for more than 2 hours. Fine...so we just sat on a bench at the exciting Ottawa airport and took turns napping. Finally at 10:30am, we got back into line and were able to go through customs and get rid of half of our luggage as it was checked in. Now all we had was our carry-on, which included Lisa's wedding dress (part of our honeymoon was attending Lisa and Stephan's wedding) as I was the matron of honour. After a while, I just pretended the dress was mine, because it was too much trouble explaining that I was bringing the dress for someone else.

So once we got through and into the waiting area, we learned that the 12:30pm flight was delayed to 1:15 and we finally boarded the plane at 1:30. Yay! We were on our way to Hawaii, finally.... The only other travel problem that we encountered was due to the delay in Ottawa, we missed our connection to LAX by literally 10 minutes (we watched the plane push away as we got to the gate...O'Hare is a big airport, we had to move from Gsomething to Ksomething...), so I had to call American and get them to reroute us, again. Fortunately there was one last flight out of LAX to Honolulu putting us there at 12:55am local time, almost 11 hours later than we were supposed to arrive. We were also thinking at this point and called the Hotel and our shuttle to inform them that we would be late. When we called the hotel, they were very happy that we called because Honolulu was packed that night because Pearl Jam was opening for U2 that night, and the Honolulu marathon was the next day. So it was... a little busy.

We fortunately had no more problems getting to Honolulu, the shuttle driver found us, we got lei'd, and got a nice tour of Honolulu/Waikiki since a lot of roads were closed for the marathon. Fun...but at least we were finally here. When we checked into the hotel, the Outrigger Waikiki Shore, we were informed that we could only get a room with two twin beds because we were checking in so late, but I was too exhausted (after travelling 27 hours and being awake almost 48) to complain. Fortunately, the bed was made up as a king size when we got to the room, so it wasn't so bad.

But in the end, we made it to Hawaii, and our honeymoon could begin. I'll try and write more soon...