You’ve probably gathered that I work for a pretty spectacular company and am one of the few people who can say that I love my job and mean it. I realize you probably want to stab me, so I’ll just add fuel to the fire: one of the perks of working for my organization is use of a beach house in Hawaii.
Not too shabby right?
Which is how Alan and I found ourselves at DCA at seven o’clock Friday morning, checking in for a flight to Oahu by way of Seattle. And how – a mere 19 hours later – we were standing at the luggage carousel in Honolulu, watching as a lone bag made its victory lap, my own bag no where to be seen.
I was trying to reassure myself when a representative from Alaska Air approached. “Are you Alison?” I nodded. “Your bag is on the next flight arriving from Seattle, which gets in in two hours.”
I wanted to cry. It was 8:30pm Hawaii time, which meant that in my world, it was 2:30am. I hadn’t slept on the flight and was deliriously tired. Alan wisely persuaded me against having the airline deliver the bag to us in the morning. “You’ll sleep better with your own clothes and toothpaste,” he argued.
Finally, I acquiesced, so we headed to Waikiki to burn an hour while waiting for my bag to arrive. Waikiki was low on my list of places to see, so I was completely fine knocking it out while I was tired and just needed to kill a bit of time. Check. I’m fine if we never go back.
Two hours later, we retrieved my bag (yay!) and were bound for the North Shore, where we’d made reservations in Haleiwa via AirBNB. Although I was so tired I wanted to stab someone at the time, it probably was the best thing for reseting our clocks and shaking jet lag. We crashed at midnight and got a solid eight hours in – and have been running on Hawaiian time ever since.
Lesson: Thank You, Alaska Airlines for losing (then quickly finding!) my luggage.
Well, it probably didn’t hurt that our lodging was right on the Ali’i Beach. It’s hard to wake up angry when you’re looking out over the Pacific.
Next up: What to do on a rainy day on Oahu?
pithypants 