Saturday 21st September 2013 turned out to be a very looooooong day! With a flight departing at 9:20pm we'd already had a full day of packing and organising stuff, tidying the house, an awesome Crossfit workout (thanks Coach Chris!) and making sure we had everything (we don't!), before we finally left the house at 5pm. Dinner at Maccas, browsing the duty free shops, and we were on board ready to depart Sydney on schedule. We even took off on schedule. Unfortunately one of our fellow passengers became unwell within a short time of take off, a doctor travelling on our flight assessed them to be unfit to continue further, and we were diverted to Brisbane to offload them and refuel. Had we returned to Sydney we wouldn't have been allowed to take off again as we had exceeded the 11pm cut off for air traffic. It was nice to note that nobody was particularly upset about the delay in spite of many people having connecting flights to other destinations, these things happen, and it could be you some day. We finally got back in the air a few minutes before 2am, when we should have been half way to Honolulu.

A restless night was had by all, partly due to the cramped seats in Economy, partly from the crying 8 month old in the row in front of us. Not sure what his problem was, but I'm sure his parents got even less sleep than we did. We landed in Honolulu at 2:15pm (still on Saturday 21st), a fairly quick check through Customs, collected our bags and headed off to the Inter-Island terminal for our flight to Lihue. The excellent Customer Service team at Hawaiian Airlines had already transferred us to a new flight, we checked in our luggage and got to the gate just as they were starting to board. The flight felt extremely short compared to the one we'd just got off, there was barely time for the attendants to serve juice and collect the rubbish before we landed!

We grabbed the shuttle over to the Thrifty car rental office, signed the paperwork and in no time at all we were on the road with our ride for the week - an orange soft top 4 door Jeep Wrangler that I have dubbed "Julia", for the similarity in colour to the flaming orangey red hair of Australia's recently deposed Prime Minister, Julia Gillard (Chay isn't too thrilled with the name, but its better than Leo's suggestion of "Carrot Top" and I'm not a fan of "Ranga"!)

We pointed north on the highway and 45 minutes later (a lot of which consisted of me reminding Chay which side of the road he's meant to be on!) we arrived in Princeville and checked into the Wyndham Ka'eo Kai Resort. Having read numerous reviews on TripAdvisor I was a little apprehensive of what we'd end up with even though we're owners in the Wyndham timeshare club, so it was a pleasant surprise to discover that, although we don't have one of the renovated rooms away from the road as requested, we do have one of the few rooms with A/C! We don't need to leave windows open to keep cool, negating the issue of road noise (and roosters!) right outside our apartment. Its a massive 2 bedroom apartment with a huge wrap around lanai (thats the deck or balcony for those not down with the Hawaiian lingo), a little dated on the decor front, but perfect for us. We grabbed some groceries from the local supermarket (thanks Wyndham discount card for saving us $40!), a quick dinner of salad and rolls, showers all round, and everyone was in bed at 8:30pm. Which means from the time I woke up in Sydney at 6am until we got to bed in Princeville was... well, more hours than I can easily work out, so lets call it "a really really long day with very little sleep" - definitely "From Dusk Till Dawn"!

Extremely happy to have "Hawaii Four-O" under way... :)