Sojourn in the Sun, Part 12: Epilog

January 18, 2023 to January 20, 2023

A few extra days in Paradise

MY COUSIN HAS LIVED IN HAWAI'I for something going on 40 years. In all that time this is only our second visit, but we make the most of the opportunity. By happenstance her father (the last surviving member of my father's generation, and a brother to whom he was especially close) is also there. Her son is keen to improve his bridge-playing skills, so our collective presence provides a perfect opportunity for him to practice. Each afternoon he comes by and we enjoy a couple hours of card playing.

My cousin is a good host, and we enjoy ourselves. Having just completed nearly two weeks with full daily agendas, we do little more than relax, unwind (unwind? from a vacation? Well, yeah.), and converse. It's a fine, easy couple of days and they pass quickly.

Walking out to lunch one afternoon we encounter the "Holiday skeletons", noted and explicitly identified on Google Maps as a "Local cultural landmark".

My final avian portrait. These birds are ubiquitous- as common as sparrows- and for a long while I assumed they were undersized mourning doves or pigeons. They are doves, as it turns out, but a different type: zebra doves. They range in size from about half the size of a mourning dove to nearly as large, and they're everywhere.

Finally, it's time to go. Our flight is scheduled to depart at five; boarding begins at 4:10 and proceeds smoothly. We push back from the gate bang on schedule or perhaps even a few minutes early, taxi partway across the airport... and stop. "Ladies and gentlemen" the cabin crew announce after a bit, "we're sorry to have to tell you we're returning to the gate. A passenger is ill and needs to leave the aircraft." ("Aircraft": why is it always "aircraft" and never "plane"?)

Alright, we're only going to be delayed by a few minutes. There's always some pad in the scheduled flight time anyhow and they might be able to make up a few minutes en route. No problem.

We push back from the gate a second time, taxi for a looooooooong time (right to the end of our runway, in fact), and then... "Ladies and gentlemen, I'm sorry to have to inform you that the captain has a warning light on the instrument panel. Our instrument panel is showing an alert that the APU valve [whatever that is, or does] isn't closed. We're going to have to return to the gate again because the valve can only be inspected from outside the aircraft [there's that word again] and the ground crew cannot come to us. Please keep your seats, though: this will be a quick pause. We'll leave the engines running and be on our way momentarily."

"Momentarily" turns out to be an optimistic assessment, as I conclude when I realize that the engines have in fact been shut off after all. We're at the gate long enough that an additional announcement becomes necessary: "Ladies and gentlemen, the Captain has had to shut off the engines to ensure the safety of the ground personnel. They'll have to bring a cart out so that we can re-start them, and then the Captain will need to finish some paperwork before we can depart."

The additional delay is too much for some of the passengers; it's now going on two hours after the scheduled departure and they're going to be missing their connections at Dulles. Some of them elect to deplane, further adding to the delay.

You never want to see or experience this: three separate pushbacks and taxi routes before you finally get to and leave the runway.

Finally, at long last, we push back a third time and taxi slowly across the entire airport once again. Third time's lucky, though: we're finally airborne and on our way. The rest of the flight proceeds without incident, although we do encounter several patches of turbulence along the way, causing the seat belt sign to be periodically illuminated.

It's eight and a half hours' flying time from Honolulu to Dulles. My wife manages to doze for a few hours but I'm awake the entire way. Movies keep me entertained, or at least distracted, but I'm very glad when we swoop down and hit the runway tarmac with a thump. My wife's sister is there to collect us, and we're whisked back home with the least amount of fuss and drama imaginable.

Arriving relatively early on a Saturday morning is good, from a traffic perspective: despite construction on the Beltway, the seemingly omnipresent traffic tie-up at the bridge that carries us from Virginia back into Maryland is notably absent this morning and we never even slow down.

And so we're back home now. It's chilly but not really harshly cold; the sky and the woods are gray but there's no snow or ice to contend with. Our cat still loves us, and tells us so when we enter the house. We'll sleep well tonight, and start settling back into regular life and routines tomorrow. All is well in our world.

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Bill ShaneyfeltEnjoyed your tour even without a bike... My youngest brother moved there in '76. I've been there 4 times. I could easily live there!

Thanks for posting!
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1 year ago

Keith AdamsTo Bill ShaneyfeltThanks for reading- glad you enjoyed it! Hawai'i is my very favorite place on the planet though I doubt I'd be happy living there year around. It's great to visit every now and again.
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1 year ago