Hawaii

I tried to post from our vacation, but the hotel internet connection was very slow and I never could get anything to publish. Instead I kept a journal in Word and I'll paste it in now.
Day One!
We're here!
Yesterday was our travel day, and it was exhausting!
We got up at 4:00 - after not going to bed until after midnight the night before (not that I slept at all, worrying about the kids!) When we went into Asher's room to kiss him goodbye he woke up and just looked at us. His diaper was soaked, of course, so we got him up and changed him and I held him for a minute - which of course set off the tears. We left the house at 4:30 for the airport - I cried all the way down the mountain. What a dork!
Our first flight was about 2 hours to Oakland. When we landed there I called Natalie right away. It was 8:40 at home and she and the kids were watching TV. She said Asher acted like it was no big deal that she was there in the morning instead of me - what a relief! No crying or anything. We grabbed some breakfast at the Oakland airport - a faux sausage biscut for me (ick!) and the 'big breakfast' for Matt. Both included fake eggs and fake cheese, but real greese. Seriously gross.
Our second flight was about 6 hours to Honolulu. We had no meal service on the flight, so before we left we both picked up a snack size bag of chips from a deli in the airport. Dorrito's for me and Sun Chips for Matt.
Both flights were bumpy - when we left Salt Lake the pilot told us that the visibility report was actually zero - he'd never heard that before. Comforting. Anyway, the flights were bumpy, the Oakland landing was jarring, and the takeoff was a little frightening, as well.
I always look around the plane at the other passengers when that's the case and it amazes me to see everyone acting like they don't feel what I do - like it's no different than hitting a speed bump in a parking lot. Do they not realize that the plane could crash and they could die? Or are they trying to be cool? Don't get me wrong, I'm honestly not afraid to fly - I know it's safer than driving, yada, yada, yada - but I think it deserves a little bit of anxiety!
Anyway, by the time we reached Honolulu it was about 2:00pm, local time, 5:00 home time, and we'd been traveling for 13 hours. We were both nauseous from the flights and the crappy food we'd had all day, but hungry, too.
We moved our Honolulu to Kauai flight up as early as we could, from 8:00 to 5:00, and found a Mexican restaurant in the airport that looked pretty decent. We shared a plate of Nachos and I called my mom to make sure that she'd picked Tessa up from school and taken her to her friends Birthday party. She had, and said Tessa was happy and excited. She also told me that when Natalie dropped off the bag I had packed for Tess to her she got to see Asher and he was doing well.
When Natalie went to leave my parents house my truck didn't start. My mom called my dad and he came home and jumped the truck, then took it down to the dealership and replaced the battery. Thank God it died where it did! I would have felt awful if Natalie had to deal with that somewhere else - at least she had my parents to help!
After talking to my mom I called Natalie. She had just given Asher a bath and was about to put him to bed. I told her we'd call again later to talk to Tessa after her Birthday party.
Then we hung out in the airport until it was time to leave.
When we landed in Kauai I called home and talked to Tess. She didn't get home from the Birthday party until 8:30 and was exhausted! She and Natalie were watching a movie and then she was going to bed.
Driving to our hotel was a bit of an adventure - the island is beautiful! Kauai is the 'Garden Island' and is so green and lush...it's really like a rainforest. There are chickens and roosters everywhere - they just wander around! We saw our first rooster crossing the street in front of us - in the crosswalk! - as we made our first turn out of the airport. From there we had to have seen 4 dozen before we got to the hotel. There are lots of cows grazing, too. It's a little funny to see, because they aren't grazing on regular grass like at home - it's huge and leafy and strange looking. The trees are amazing - some are 40, 50, 60 feet tall. There are some that look like cactus plants, except that it's certainly not dry here! There are some that look like the Japanese Maples that we have at home, only they are about 20 times the size of those! They have pine trees here, which we weren't expecting, and there are some that look a little like pine trees but are very tall and skinny and look incredibly phallic. The first one I saw made me laugh out loud. (Eventually we started calling them ‘the penis tree’, and I took a couple of pictures of them before we left.) And there are palm trees, of course. It's SO green. It's humid, but not overly so. It's warm, about 70 degrees, and the air smells fresh and a tiny bit sweet.
When we landed it was cloudy, but clearing up. It was also getting late and the sun was starting to go down. The clouds weren't grey, like they have been at home, but almost gold tinted...
In short, it's gorgeous here.
The sun set quickly. One minute we had some light left and the next it was pitch black. There are street lights on the main highways, but none on any of the smaller roads. Luckily that's about when we made it to our hotel. We checked in, parked and came up to the room. It's huge and very nice. In the center is a kitchen, dining nook and family room area with a balcony. On the right is a master bedroom with bathroom - including a huge bathtub. On the left is the second bedroom and bathroom, also huge. It reminds me a lot of the hotel we stayed at in Cancun. We were quite irritated last night, though, as this is very obviously a family resort. There are kids everywhere. We really felt like we should have brought the kids with us. I'm irritated that I didn't know more about the place - and more about the timeshare thing...
As a timeshare the resort set up differently than a regular hotel. For instance, maid service is only preformed once during a week stay, unless you'd like to pay for more. Also, there's no room service.
We were starving, and we were counting on room service, so this was bad news for us. After over an hour of looking online, in the phonebook and driving around, we finally found a hamburger and some nachos to split for dinner.
I fell asleep at about 9:00 local time, Matt was right behind me. I woke up once, at 1:30, to go to the bathroom. Up until that point I can bad dreams that I could see Asher, but not hear him, and that he wanted to be held, but I couldn't pick him up. Pathetic, huh?! After that, though, I slept a dreamless sleep until 7:00 in the morning. Matt woke up just after I did and now we're about to get ready for the day and see what fun we can find! I'll post more, later!