Ye'ah Ha'wa'i'i'i'i!!!!!!

"Our estimated flight time is just a shade over 5 hours and it looks like it'll be a smooth one. You folks picked a great destination. In Denver it is currently 19 degrees, Chicago is 21, Minneapolis is 11 and even Miami is a chilly 65 degrees. The current temperature in Honolulu is 75 degrees."

They even had a contest where you win a grand prize of a Mauna Loa gift set. Invented words with lots of vowels!!! Yeah!!! only a quarter of the seats on the flight were taken so everybody got an entire row. The flight attendants were all middle aged men who really enjoy being flight attendants. If you flirt with them they give you free drinks.

In the Honolulu airport the men's room icon is wearing a Hawaiian shirt and their "Pardon the Construction" sign was a guy wearing a hardhat, a lei, a tool belt and flip flops. Promise I'll take pictures when I fly out next week.

People always talk about how expensive Hawaii is, but I largely attribute that to them being idiots. Granted, some things are outrageously priced: milk was on sale for $4 a gallon (usually it's $6.80), eggs were $3 a dozen, and a loaf of generic Safeway brand white bread was $3.50. Yet flour is as cheap as it is on the mainland. As are pastas, canned and bottled products, meats, dried beans, and most other things. Ramen noodles are 37 cents (6 for a dollar on sale) and never bought milk or eggs (or produce) at the grocery store in DC. I went to the Korean owned Latino market a few blocks over because everything fresh was half to a quarter of the price. I"ll do some more research and keep everyone posted of developments because I know you are all enthralled with the prospect of dramatically reducing the minimum necessary budget allocation percentage of food purchases in Oahu.

Chose to walk rather than take the bus on day one, but rest assured that a comprehensive report on the state of public transportation on Hawaii's most populous island will be forthcoming.