Hawaii Vaca, Post 1 - Travel Day

It's the first post of vacation 2017for the Schmitz Mobile Chaos Unit!

Much like our trip to China in late 2011, I will post mostly pictures first and then I will type up my hand-written journal when we get back home and have decent (meaning, non-laptop) keyboards and a handy little mouse to click on things with.  

I have several pages so far and that's only for the about 1.5312932 days.

So this first post is to cover our first day, mostly traveling with a slight detour to the Waikiki Beach in the evening, since it is across the road from our hotel.

Here we go:
 I had the window seat for the take-off which was great, because we flew along I-80 westbound for quite a while.  I would say to the kids, "there's Diamond Head Lake where Uncle Vince and Aunt Kristie used to live" or, "there's Wanda's house" or, the one that really blew their minds because of how fast we got there, "Uncle Steve and Aunt Kathy's house is probably just outside the other side of the plane" and by the time they got over that, "Henry Doorly Zoo is right below us!".  They couldn't believe how fast we got that far but then I lost the interstate for a while.  When I found it again, I had NO IDEA where we were at. 

Soon after that, we started trading seats so everybody would get a turn at the window and get to experience the sights below.  Since we were only flying from Des Moines to Phoenix, we weren't traveling at a great elevation and the ground was highly visible from the plane.

After leaving Phoenix with Caleb at the window, we again traded seats once we were "out to sea".  There's really not a ton of stuff to look at after that, but the cloud formations were fantastic and it was interesting because you could see the sun reflect off of white caps on the ocean due to our angle.

Here's a few pics:

Somewhere over the Pacific Ocean.  The clouds in the distance could truly be icebergs just as easily as clouds from the way they look!

On the plane after many hours...  I'm back manning the window seat...  Whats hard to see in this picture is how bad our bones are sick and tired of this freaking airplane!!

This is from the tiny little deck outside of our hotel room.  The pool area and the ocean right off of Waikiki Beach.

This photo is from Lesley's phone while Robby, Caleb and myself are in the water.

And speaking of the three lads, we're somewhere out there in the water in this pic...  which is just about as close as I'm comfortable with being photographed without a shirt on!  :-)

And so was day 1 on our Hawaiian trip.