Its blog o’clock in Hawaii!

[S] We’re here!  Turned out to be a fairly long journey – our Wellington flight was delayed about 55 minutes, which meant that we landed at Auckland Domestic just five minutes before our flight from the International terminal was due to board.  That panicked me a bit but Allan was pretty cool with it.  It helped that there were 20 of us on the Wellington flight.  Anyway, we scootled across to the other terminal, rushed through customs with no time for duty free shopping, and boarded 25 minutes late - phew!

The flight was pretty bumpy much of the way, but we settled down to sleep at around 11 pm.  Didn’t work.  Allan doesn’t think he slept at all and I reckon that I got maybe a couple of hours.  We arrived here at 5.30 am body clock time and 6.30 am Friday morning local time (having left home on Friday evening).  This a great trick for the step-counter.  I had around 6000 on it on Friday and then another 1500 on Saturday getting through customs at Honolulu.  Then my watch finally synced to local time and it was Friday again and I have got up to 15,000 steps for Friday.  Good effort me!

There were no duty-free shops at Honolulu airport arrivals that we could find – most surprising!

We had a good amble downtown, walked quite a distance and got our bearings.  I got waylaid by one of those clever salesmen who have you in the door and are putting potions on your face before you blink.  Very smooth technique for sure – this cream is just $1000 (USD!) and this is $200 and these two are $250 each – but if you buy today…you know how it goes!  Because I really needed the product (according to the salesman) he would even give me his staff discount if I promised not to tell anyone – so the first two products came down to $250 for both.  Quite a crack up to watch and listen to the patter knowing I was never going to buy, but finding it quite hard to escape.  Needless to say, Allan had walked on in the half hour I was trapped.  We did see many, many shops where there was no price on display, and if you had to ask, you couldn’t afford it.  Nice to nose around though. It's very pretty with lush foliage and palm trees swaying in the breeze.

We were able to check in early and promptly fell asleep for an hour or two – hardly surprising!.  Out for a cheap and cheerful dinner on the waterfront and now back at the hotel planning our itinerary for the week.