Christmas was GREAT! As has become my family's tradition, we all went over to my brother's house to watch his kids open presents on Christmas morning. My brother and his wife are amazingly generous. Neither my sister nor I have children so they've always included us along with my mom in their Christmas celebrations. We had a great morning, at breakfast, then went swimming in his pool. Christmas in Hawaii is a warm weather event. Later that evening, we were invited over to my sister-in-law's sister's house for supper on Christmas night. It was all great.
The 26th was a busy day as we had to get everything together before flying back to LA in the evening. We had breakfast with friends that I used to teach with in Hawaii, then went to see a new house that one of them is in the process of moving into.
I spent the afternoon hanging out with my mom and sister while S/O finished grading exam papers.
In the early evening we packed and shut the condo up. We were just about finished when a huge thunderstorm passed over the island. It is suspected that lighting struck some major transmission lines, but the bottom line is that an island-wide blackout plunged the island of O'ahu into total darkness except for the emergency lighting in some of the high rises. We did the best we could to close up the condo, then drove up to my mom's house in total darkness. Amazingly, Honolulu International Airport was running on generator power so we went to the airport for our flight that was scheduled for 11:20pm. The airport was open, but the x-ray machines weren't working at the security checkpoints so the TSA agents were checking everyone's luggage by hand then patting everyone down by hand as well. It was organized, but very slow. We finally got out of Honolulu 3 hours late.
We spent the day re-packing and we're heading back to LAX to fly to New York in a few minutes.
It was quite an adventure of a day!
Ambookgeek's Blog 