We love most things about living in Aggieland, but one thing we don’t like is the layer of complexity it adds to travel, especially when we’re going a long distance or on a trip that requires multiple flights. This trip qualifies on both counts!

We can’t get to Rome non-stop on United from Houston, so we decided to go through Chicago so we could get on a Dreamliner. That meant our flight was at 9:50 Saturday morning, and the shuttle service we use doesn’t run that early on weekends so we stayed at the airport Marriott. We liked it for the convenience factor, but unfortunately our room overlooked the Terminal B construction which is apparently a 24/7 operation. The incessant beep, beep, beep of construction vehicles backing up started around 2:45 a.m. and never stopped. That means we were starting the trip sleep deprived, but I suppose we’ll get caught up at some point.

Both flights were excellent! We were on fairly new planes for both flights, and that made a huge positive difference. We were even able to get comfortable enough to sleep for a couple hours, something Jim usually does and I never do!

It’s not something I thought about much before I hurt my ankle, but in my very non-professional opinion the pressurization on newer planes is much better than on the old buckets of bolts that have been my last few United flights. I was surprised in February (6 months post-surgery) when a reasonably short flight affected my ankle so much I was in pain for about 24 hours. I didn’t make the connection until our problem-free flight home on a much newer plane. Anyway, the conclusion I’ve drawn is that newer airplanes are easier on surgically repaired ankles than older planes and you’ll never convince me otherwise!😂

Our travel day was somewhat of an eating frenzy. We started with a full breakfast in the Polaris Lounge in Houston, got a meal on our first flight (we opted for the charcuterie knowing we would have just eaten breakfast), grazed in the Polaris Lounge in Chicago, and had two meals on the flight to Rome!😳

We got into Rome a few minutes early, and got through immigration and customs in about an hour. We had been dreading the new EES, but in reality it looked much worse than it was. It was crowded and chaotic, but there were plenty of airport employees helping to keep things moving. Jim noted that some were more blunt than others, but it was an effective system! It was much better than Schiphol last August when we stood for 2 hours in a sweltering area in a line that barely moved.

We easily found our Rome Cabs driver and got to Civitavecchia around 10:00. The only problem we had was finding our hotel (actually a guest house) even though we had the address. We’re staying at 7 Bell’s House which is located on the first (second) floor of an old building filled with apartments, another guest house, and some businesses. If you don’t know what you’re looking for it’s easy to miss! Nevertheless we did manage, and the lovely host made us coffee and then held our luggage while we walked around a bit.

Our room was ready at 11:45!🙂 We set an alarm, and I think we were both asleep by noon! After we showered and organized things a bit we walked to dinner at Our Lord Bistro which I had found on line. Dinner was excellent. There’s just something about fresh pasta that can’t be beat. We declined dessert in favor of a trip to the local Gelateria, and we were back in our room and ready to sleep by 8:00 when most locals were just getting ready for dinner.😂

Unfortunately sleep was elusive again. The Inter Milan football team had just won the Italian League, and fans were celebrating by driving around town with horns blaring until almost midnight. Jet-lag got the best of me around 3:30 am, so I guess I’m destined to get caught up on my sleep slowly this time!

I mentioned something about airline credit and vouchers in my last post for my shortened Nieuw Statendam cruise, so I think that’s a good place to start talking about my next trip.

Our travel insurance company flew us home on Lufthansa last year. If possible, travel insurance companies don’t like to bring patients into the US at an airport other than their final destination because they don’t want you to have to go through immigration and customs and then re-check bags/go through security again. Jim learned that Lufthansa has a reputation for doing an excellent job with medical/repatriation flights, and I can vouch for that. Their reputation is well deserved.

We decided not to claim our unused airfare on our travel insurance. In our minds we had several things scheduled domestically starting in December and thought that would be a nice way to use the credit. We found out shortly after we got home that the credit could only be applied for a flight from Europe to the US, and had to be used by early August of 2026. Well, twist my arm. I certainly wasn’t going to let the flight credit go to waste, and if I had to go to Europe to use it then that’s just what I was going to do! I started researching, decided on a Celebrity Med cruise that fit our schedule and would get us to ports that are mostly new to us, and started planning! Remember, I was non-weight bearing most of the fall and spent most of my time at home, so booking travel gave me something fun to plan and look forward to.

All the details fell in place nicely. We paid for the cruise, planned and booked tours, and started getting excited. Not that I needed it, but it also gave me extra motivation for rehabbing my ankle. I had to be able to walk on cobblestones by the beginning of May.

In January Jim heard airfare for the spring/summer would be going up considerably and we decided to go ahead and buy plane tickets. That’s when we were hit with the sad realization that our nice United Polaris credit was really worth nothing. Zero. Zip. Nada. The credit couldn’t be applied to a round trip, so the only way to use the credit was to purchase two one-way tickets. Since each of the one ways was almost the same price as a round trip it actually would have cost us more to use the voucher than to purchase new tickets!😳

We decided to go ahead with our plans. At that point I was too far into planning and we were both looking forward to the trip too much to cancel. That’s how our “low cost air” Mediterranean cruise ended up being anything but “low cost air” for us!

Lesson learned…find out what the fine print says. I keep telling myself that our insurance company would have used our existing tickets if they could, but it’s still irritating. Hopefully we’ll never have to leave a trip early like that again, but if we do I’ll certainly claim the value of the return tickets!

 We woke up on Thursday, August 14 to cloudy skies, but it wasn’t raining and we were finally in Iceland, so we didn’t really care! We were both ready for the first of five days in Iceland, which was the reason we chose the cruise. Little did we know our trip to Iceland was going to end up looking very different than what we had planned.

We met our guide, Helga of Tinna Adventures at the port in Djupivogur and we were off for a day of seeing the hidden valleys and waterfalls of east Iceland.

East Iceland is remote and rugged. We made our way on narrow roads through grassy valleys surrounded by jagged, rocky peaks, stopping occasionally to admire a waterfall or just the amazing scenery.

Our third stop was in an area with a dry riverbed and a hidden waterfall. We walked on a path towards the waterfall, and as we were walking down a slight slope towards the riverbed I decided to step aside to let someone pass when “it” happened. My feet went out from under me on the damp, loose gravel, and I found myself sitting when I didn’t want to be! Even worse, my right leg had cooperated and gone down the slope foot first, but my left leg was awkwardly pinned underneath me. Our fantastic guide Helga tried to help me get up, but when she did we realized my left foot was in a position it shouldn’t have been in and vacation was probably over. That was it…after all the careful planning and preparation my Iceland vacation lasted two hours.😢

 

That split-second event was the first in what would prove to be a VERY long day. Thankfully Helga is an EMT and part of the local remote rescue team and she knew exactly what to do. I’m not going to give you a blow-by-blow account of the rest of the day, but here are the highlights:

• I fell around 11:00. The ambulance arrived about 45 minutes after I fell. They immobilized my ankle and took me by ATV down the riverbed to the waiting ambulance.
• Jim rode in front and saw amazing sights during the hour and a half ride to hospital #1 in Neskaupstadur. I had a lovely view of the frosted glass and the back doors of the ambulance.
• They took x-rays and the on-duty physician told me my ankle was broken in three places (not true) and I needed surgery. He added that he was a surgeon but only worked on the esophagus😳 so I would need to go elsewhere.
• It was determined that I needed to be transported to the hospital in Akureyri where I could be seen by an orthopedic doctor. Before we left Neskaupstadur they communicated by phone and text with the doctor in Akureyri and managed (with a great deal of difficulty and mess!) to push my dislocated ankle bones back to something resembling normal and put me in a plaster cast.
• While all this was going on Jim was busy on the phone and e-mail with our travel insurance company, our credit card company, and the ship.
• Thankfully they decided to transport me by air ambulance instead of making the 4 and a half hour trip to Akureyri by road ambulance. Again, Jim had spectacular views and I could see some clouds and the ceiling of the plane.🙄
• In Akureyri more x-rays were taken, and the physician on-call came in and told me they would operate in the morning. Alarm bells went off. What do you mean you will operate in the morning? After a discussion with Jim, we decided (well, I decided and he agreed) that our best course of action would be to have the surgery at home. There were several reasons why we made the decision. My primary reason was I hadn’t met the surgeon, I wouldn’t be able to speak to the surgeon until he or she arrived in the morning, and nobody could or would tell me exactly what surgery would be performed. Other considerations were the length of time I would need to stay in Iceland before we could go home, what I would do for follow-up care and rehab if I had surgery in Iceland, and finally what the costs would be since we would have to put the surgery on our credit card and then get reimbursed by our travel insurance company.
• The decision to go home started a whole chain of events. The hospital staff were very unhappy with our decision and really pushed back. Once they realized we had made up our minds their tone changed and they pretty much washed their hands of us. We were told we had to leave and to make sure we paid on the way out! We tried to borrow or purchase a wheelchair but the best they could do was a flimsy pair of crutches which I was incapable of using. I can’t count how many times I almost fell which probably would have resulted in me annihilating the rest of my limbs!
• We managed (with no help from the hospital) to find a hotel. The room was on the 4^th floor but thankfully was very close to the elevator and had an accessible bathroom. By this time it was about 11:30. We were hungry, dirty, and utterly exhausted. We spent the next few hours attempting to sleep but it was hard to get comfortable and there were too many ifs, ands, or buts that kept us awake.
• Fortunately our ship was in Akureyri on Friday, and we got cleared to reboard the ship to sail to Reykjavik to disembark and fly home. I was happy to be reunited with my passport, my cash, and my clothes!
• I learned quickly that a cruise ship is a difficult place to be when you can only use one leg and you’re confined to a wheelchair in a non-accessible cabin. I used our bathroom once to shower and it was SCARY getting in and out! For the rest of the time we were on the ship I used accessible public facilities and/or a commode chair.
• We were very naïve about what it would take to get us home. Our first thought was we would call United and change our flight so we could fly home from Reykjavik instead of Amsterdam. Well, it really doesn’t work like that. As we found out, it’s complicated. I had to get a “Fit to Fly” clearance from the ship’s doctor, and once I had that our travel insurance handled all the arrangements. They were not able to use our existing tickets to make acceptable arrangements (more on that later) and booked us on Lufthansa through Frankfurt with a nurse. At first I thought the nurse was overkill, but when presented with the alternative of getting catheterized for the trip I thought the nurse was a great idea! Actually, the nurse was a Godsend. He made all the arrangements and eased the way at every step of the 26 hour trip! He even accompanied us all the way to Bryan before turning around and heading back to his home near Milan.

There are a lot of details I left out because they really aren’t that exciting. The staff on the ship were wonderful, and our fantastic neighbors took great care of us before we got home and in the weeks after surgery. Needless to say I think good travel insurance is one of the most important things to pack for a foreign trip. Even if you don’t mind eating the cost of an interrupted trip or a last minute cancellation, you need the foreign medical and repatriation coverage. Our insurance paid out tens of thousands of dollars, but if we hadn’t been able to fly commercial the number would have been in the hundreds of thousands.

 

Two days after we got home I had an appointment at Central Texas Sports Medicine and Orthopaedics where they verified I did indeed need surgery to repair the ligaments in my ankle. Notice that I had zero broken bones in my ankle, not three as I was told at hospital #1! My Fibula was broken near my knee which nobody was very concerned about because they said it would heal itself (it has).

 

I had “Tight Rope” surgery on August 22, during which they drilled through the Fibula and Tibia and anchored 2 “ropes” to the desired tension to pull everything back in place while my ligaments healed. Jim was very enthusiastic when he read this was the surgery Tua Tagliavoa had when he got hurt in the SEC Championship Game in 2019 and managed to come back and play in the National Championship Game. Alas, I am neither in my 20s nor an elite athlete, so it took me much longer to get back to normal than Tua! Recovery time aside, the nice thing about the surgery I had is I don’t have metal that may one day need to come out, and the tight ropes are supposed to have a better long-term outcome with less chance of osteoarthritis. I have one very small metal “button” to reattach an outside ligament to the bone, and I don’t even set off metal detectors!

 

So that’s it! That’s my Iceland story. I just haven’t felt like writing it until now, 261 days after I slid down a gravelly, damp slope in remote East Iceland. Why today? Well, we’re sitting on a flight waiting to take off from Houston, and we’re headed to Rome for a Mediterranean cruise! I feel like today ends the “ankle injury” chapter of my life story, and so I thought it would be a great time to wrap up my blog that’s been in limbo for the better part of the last eight months.

 

Later today I’ll start my next blog with a happier post. I’ll even tell you about how this trip came to be. Here’s a sneak peek…it involved United and Travel Vouchers, and what we learned about using airline credit!

Monday was a perfect and perfectly relaxing sea day. Unfortunately our perfect and perfectly relaxing sea day was over five months ago, so the details are sketchy! I know our activities involved coffee, food, getting things organized for our two week cruise, meeting on-line friends, tour companions, and dining companions in real life, food, relaxing, food, a show, and sleep.

For dinner on Monday we went to Tamarind. It may be my new favorite specialty restaurant! Everything we had was delicious, and I was happy we planned to eat there again during the cruise.

Tuesday didn’t look too promising at first, but we were in Norway so it was half expected and it wasn’t going to slow us down! We had a late morning arrival, so we took advantage of the open morning to attend a class in the gym (we had purchased an unlimited class pass) and have breakfast in Club Orange before we disembarked. I had the traditional American breakfast and wasn’t impressed (my eggs were overcooked), but Jim’s Full English breakfast was great!

By the time we got to Alesund the weather was perfect! We couldn’t have asked for better…brilliant blue skies, plenty of sunshine, and not too cold! We arrived on time and reported to the theater to disembark for our tour.

We thought the disembarkation system the Nieuw Statendam uses was very modern and efficient. They make announcements, but the whole process is streamlined by the use of a departures board. The only problem we saw was the people who simply refuse to follow directions because they have to be first.

Once our Hjorundfjord Cruise group was called we quickly disembarked and found the excursion boat for a three-hour tour. Thankfully our three-hour tour was better than Gilligan’s! We chose a corner upstairs and we were off to see our first Norwegian fjords.

At first I was disappointed there was so little seating, but honestly it was much easier to see both sides this way. It didn’t take long for us to realize Norway needed to go to the top of the “must go back” list. I’m going to let the pictures from the excursion do the explaining.

Our fjord cruise had originally been scheduled for the afternoon and we learned it was moved to the morning after we boarded the ship. At first we were disappointed, but it ended up working perfectly since the weather in the morning was bright and sunny but it clouded over as we got towards the afternoon.

We grabbed a quick lunch at the restaurant on the pier…it was good but predictably overpriced, and set off to see the town.

Of course, we didn’t have a map and went completely in the wrong direction! We didn’t mind the walk, and we eventually made it to our destination.

It was a great day, but we were ready to go when we returned to the ship. Only one more sea day stood between us and the reason for the trip…Iceland!

I woke up predictably early on Sunday with that excited “we’re going on a cruise today” feeling keeping me from sleep. We finished getting our bags ready for the ship and then went down for one last breakfast at the world’s most amazing buffet.

I had arranged transportation with Pedro Pinduko who I read about on Facebook. We were going to make a leisurely drive to Rotterdam with a stop in Kinderdijk to see the windmills.

I’m so glad I found Pedro and cancelled our other transportation! Our trip to Rotterdam was very enjoyable! Pedro was personable and knowledgeable about the things we were seeing. He took us “off the beaten path” through some delightful towns instead of taking the highway all the way to Kinderdijk.

Kinderdijk was crowded but not unmanageable. We decided not to get admission tickets, and instead we just walked the paths and saw the windmills from the outside. It was a beautiful day, and we actually got hot and had to shed layers!

It was such a pleasant trip to Rotterdam! We plan to use Pedro as a guide the next time we cruise from Rotterdam!

Before we knew it we were in Rotterdam dropping luggage. The port handles checked bags a little differently than others I’ve sailed from. Instead of handing bags over to a porter you line up and they are sent up a conveyor belt directly onto the ship! It was super easy, as was check-in. Everything is done with facial recognition now, so aside from checking passports and taking the ID pictures there really isn’t anything to do. I noticed there is no longer a health questionnaire to complete during boarding. About 10 minutes after we dropped our bags we were walking onto the ship! At last we’re cruising again!

One thing I really appreciate about Holland America is the cabins are ready when you board. We went straight to our room, a Neptune Suite on Deck 7 very close to the lounge. Almost immediately we met our cabin stewards, Mash and Nyomen. They were fantastic — attentive and eager without being intrusive or annoying. As a bonus, they actually brought our luggage with them!

We went down to the Neptune Lounge and met our phenomenal concierge Kristine (more about her later), and decided to go to the Lido for lunch.

Lunch was OK. Nothing special, but we try to avoid the buffet as much as possible and it’s always crowded on the first day. After lunch we made a quick trip to check in at our muster station, we went to the gym to check out the group fitness schedule, and then went back to our cabin to get everything unpacked and put away for two weeks! Part of unpacking was also sending out our first batch of laundry. It’s a great perk of being in a suite, and Holland America does a fantastic job with guest laundry.

We sailed on time at 4:00. It was a beautiful afternoon and we had clear views of Rotterdam and the surrounding area as we left.

We enjoyed dinner in Club Orange the first night of the cruise. We had followed our next door neighbors down to Club Orange and ended up sitting with them at dinner, as well as some other meals during the cruise.

That was it for our first day. I stopped in the casino to make a small deposit, and we were happy to be rocked to sleep on a ship headed for new to us territory!

Saturday was a beautiful day! We spent it walking miles through Amsterdam with our fantastic guide, Marten Koerse. Marten has an incredible knowledge of art and history, and we’re glad we chose him to guide us through the day.

Marten met us in the lobby of our hotel at 9:00, and we set off on a leisurely stroll to the Rijksmuseum.

Marten is a gifted storyteller, and I repeatedly saw us gathering a crowd inside the exhibit areas! I probably should have passed the hat to let those people pay their share of our tour!😂

The Night Watch is currently being restored. It sits behind giant sheets of thick glass which provide soundproofing so the experts working on the painting aren’t startled by noise from the museum guests.

As we were leaving the museum, Marten pointed out a long metal plate in the ceiling of the porte cochere. It is an emergency escape to lower the priceless masterpiece to safety in case of fire.

After we left the museum we made our way over to the Albert Cuyp Market for samplings of some of Marten’s Dutch favorites!

We started at the fish market, although both Jim and I politely declined the Pickled Herring!

By this time we were stuffed and tired, so we decided to head back to our hotel to freshen up before dinner. We were going to take the tram, but unfortunately there was a service interruption due to a large demonstration in Dam Square. Thankfully Marten was able to navigate a different way back using the Metro, and we got back to the hotel about 4:00.

Our day with Marten was exceptional, and we would love to tour with him again when/if we return to Amsterdam.

Dinner Saturday was something new to us…we arranged dinner in a private home using the “Eat With” website (https://www.eatwith.com). What a fantastic experience! We chose an Italian meal in Luca’s canal home, and are so glad we did that instead of going to a restaurant. Luca was a gracious host and an excellent cook. We enjoyed the meal, watching the chef in action, and Luca’s personal story of growing up in southern Italy and how he came to settle in Amsterdam. I highly recommend Eat With to anyone who likes to explore a different culture and get a taste of what life is like for the locals!

We didn’t have much energy left by the time we finished dinner. We knew we still needed to get back to the hotel and get packed up to leave in the morning. We were finally cruising the next day, and we couldn’t wait for 2 weeks on a ship exploring new places!

How often do we hear the words “Never Forget!” after a tragedy, either a man-made terror act or a natural disaster? Sadly, it seems like it’s frequently these days. Inevitably the hurt and shock of an event fade with time, yet I think it’s important to always remember, both to honor those who died as well as learn from the lessons of the past.

The bulk of our day Friday was spent learning about and remembering the Amsterdam Holocaust victims as well as those who tried to save as many as they could through their resistance activities. Amsterdam has a historic Jewish quarter that houses several locations of significance. We visited two of them on Friday — The Resistance Museum and the National Holocaust Museum.

Before the start of WWII Amsterdam had a thriving Jewish population of about 75,000-80,000. Drawn by Amsterdam’s history of religious tolerance, the Jewish population flourished economically and socially. There was never a Jewish ghetto in Amsterdam as in so many other European cities. That all changed virtually overnight with the German occupation in 1940.

I really can’t describe the range of emotions I felt as we toured the museums and other important sites. It’s one thing to read accounts or visit a museum here in the states, but it’s another to walk the halls of the school that was used to smuggle children to safety or the theater that was used as a deportation center.

Both museums were excellent, and extremely thought provoking in different ways. The Holocaust Museum left me wondering how and why such evil could exist, and the Resistance Museum made me question what I would have done. I always thought the answer to what I would have done was simple, but when you read the first hand accounts and learn of the terror of living through the Nazi occupation the answer isn’t that simple. I found the visits left me with a lot of questions with no straightforward answers.

Would I have been willing to risk my life, my home, my loved ones? Jim’s grandmother was a German Jew by heritage, who later married a Catholic and converted. Thankfully she had been born in the US, but if she had been in Germany would she have survived? Would Jim have been murdered because of a Jewish grandparent?

I thought it was a profound and sad sign of our times that entry into the Holocaust Museum was heavily guarded. There was an outdoor bag check, followed by entry into an outer chamber, and finally entry into the building. The safety precautions were brought home on Saturday when several tram stops near our hotel were shut down because of a Palestinian protest in Dam Square. We later learned that is an almost daily occurrence.

I also learned that the few Amsterdam Jews who survived the Holocaust weren’t welcome back with open arms after the war. The ill and traumatized victims returned to a hostile environment to find their homes occupied and their businesses gone. At one point the government even tried to get returning victims to pay back taxes for the time they had been imprisoned!

It is estimated that only 5,000-6,000 Jews returned to Amsterdam from the concentration camps or hiding places. The rest were murdered by the Nazi regime. Never forget.

We knew we would be up unreasonably early on Friday, so we planned to get out and take advantage of the sleeping city on an early morning canal cruise.

Our day started with the hotel’s excellent breakfast buffet. What a spread! I’ve never seen anything like it.

After a quick breakfast we were off to our early morning canal cruise on Captain Dave’s Royal Jonckvrouw. We chose the cruise specifically because it departed at 8:00 and was on a small boat/in a small group. It was perfect for us…relaxing and quiet. We enjoyed sitting outside and being one of a very few boats on the canals.

I’m going to deviate a bit from my normal chronological blog posts today, and skip to lunch and dinner before I fill in the hours in between.

We had lunch at a delightful little cafe in the Jewish Cultural District. It was an adventure because we really weren’t sure what we were getting! I thought my flatbread was close to what I thought I would be served, but Jim’s Louman Meatball with Amsterdam Pickles (they’re actually onions) was a surprise!

Dinner on Friday was a delight! We ate at Restaurant D’Vjiff Vlieghen, or The Five Flies. Thankfully we didn’t see any flies during our meal! The restaurant is the oldest in Amsterdam, and is located in a series of canal houses that date back to the early 1600s. (The street has been filled in, but it was once a canal.)

Walking through the door to the restaurant is taking a step back in time to an era of low ceilings and exposed beams. The building was fascinating and we thought the food and service was excellent.

After many miles, smiles, thoughts, and delicacies we were happy to go back to our hotel and fall into bed!

The ride into Central Amsterdam from Schiphol was relatively fast, and that was a good thing. At that point we were exhausted and dirty/sweaty from travel and two hours in the immigration line. We were hopeful that a room would be available early and we could check-in and catch a quick nap before our 3:00 walking tour.

It wasn’t meant to be. In fact, we heard words one never wants to hear at the end of an overnight flight, “Your room type is oversold.”

Ugh! I couldn’t even think straight to tell the hotel what we wanted to do. We had booked a Junior Suite because it had a separate “living room” and I thought that would be perfect for extra luggage and also a place to sit when one of us (that would be me🙄) couldn’t sleep. We went to lunch in the hotel cafe and took time to discuss our options.

Ultimately we decided a room with extra space was more important to us than an upgrade to a room with a terrace, so that’s what we settled on. The hotel added the amenities we would have gotten with the Junior Suite, and really bent over backwards to make up for the overbooking. Despite the mistake, we loved the hotel and thought the hotel staff was terrific.

We found out our room wouldn’t be ready until later so we retrieved our carry-ons and used the public restrooms to change clothes and freshen up before our afternoon walking tour Amsterdam in World War II.

Our guide was great and we walked all over town, but honestly at that point all I really wanted to do was put my pajamas on and relax. I thought the tour was a good prequel for our plans to visit the Resistance and Holocaust Museums on Friday, but ultimately we ended up cutting our time short so we could go back to the hotel and have some down time.

Back at the hotel we finally got in our room🎉 and ventured out one more time to the local grocery store for a dinner of cheese, meat, crackers, and cold vegetables. We saw some other interesting stores along the way!

The answer is yes, but we came close!

All good things must come to an end, even trips that were over three years in the making. Getting off the ship was uneventful, and Kirk was there to pick us up for our last day of sightseeing before heading to the airport.

I thought touring the last day was a good way to handle our late flight. We knew there was plenty we hadn’t seen, and doing it this way allowed our luggage to stay with us. The other option would have been a day use room at one of the resorts, but we would rather be out exploring so off to the North Shore it was!

We saw so much the last day I’m not sure I remember all of it. Honestly, it was a bit much even for us. We had been going non-stop for 11 days and we were at the point where we really needed some down time. Nevertheless, we weren’t getting any down time until we got on the plane, so off we went!

Our first stop was at Wailua Coffee for — wait for it — coffee (and chocolate)! We had an interesting tour of the facility and saw how the coffee and cacao gets from plant to product. I got excited when Jim bought four bags of chocolate, then I found out they were for him to take into the office!🙄

Our next stop was at Turtle Bay Resort.

Believe it or not it was time to eat (again) so we went to Lei Lei’s on the golf course at the resort. The food was pretty good, but it was super hot and super expensive (for what it was).

After lunch, we were off to the beach, and we got lucky! Not only did we see our second Monk Seal of the trip, it was also the first day the waves were big enough for surfing!

We started slowly working our way back to Honolulu. One of the stops was at the rock arch at Laie Point. The coast here is beautiful, and is a popular spot for filmmakers. Sounds like most of Hawaii!

I have to admit by this time we were both getting tired. Kirk got us as close as we could get to Marine Corps Base Hawaii so I could snap a couple pictures. Remember my nephew the USNA Plebe who was one of the reasons we started planning this trip? He’s graduating and commissioning in May, and he will be a Marine Pilot!

From the Marine Corps base we stopped at Kailua Beach Park, but we didn’t stay long. One thing I saw posted at the beach entrance was this sign, which I thought was a great idea!

Our next stop was at the Byodo-In Buddhist Temple.

Hoʻomaluhia Botanical Garden

The road to Honolulu (H-3) and the airport was fantastic, especially in Kirk’s great car. The highway is cut through the mountains and a tunnel takes you from one climate to another (wet to dry). This isn’t my picture, but it gives you a great idea of what the road is like.

Before we knew it we were back in Honolulu at the airport.😢 It seemed hard to believe that after all the waiting and planning it was over in a flash!

We packed a lot into our time, and think we saw as much of Hawaii as it’s possible to see in the time we had. We were on the go almost every minute — just how we like it!

We were thankful for the United Club as a place to wait for the flight. It had comfortable seating, TVs showing college football, and most importantly, bathrooms big enough and clean enough to change our clothes and clean up before the long flight.

Fortunately we had an equipment change for the flight home. Ordinarily I would have been annoyed, but not this time! Hallelujah, we were put on an updated plane with pods! I moved us both to window pods which meant we weren’t sitting together but we really didn’t care. We don’t talk much on planes anyway, and our objective on the red-eye flight was to sleep!

We were about an hour late leaving, but had a nice clear view of Honolulu as we ascended.

The flight was uneventful, and after an unmemorable dinner of some kind of Panko crusted chicken I managed to sleep for about 3 hours. When I woke up people were already stirring getting ready for breakfast and our arrival in Houston.

We had a great trip…it was worth the wait! Almost everything went according to plan, and all but one excursion was everything we hoped for and more. It’s always nice when things you chose from reading reviews and looking at pictures end up meeting or exceeding expectations!

That said, I’m not sure we would go back. We saw almost everything we wanted to see, and (just my opinion) there are a lot of other places we want to go before we would return to Hawaii.

Next up? Commissioning Week in Annapolis with my whole family. Planning is underway and I can’t wait!