Day 1 Hawaii: Flying Delta

Human beings, with brain, soul, and heart, could plan a path as close as they want it to be. We don't have wings, but we fly. We know about gravity, and that we defy. But this we should know: plans have to be approved and clearly we can't sign it ourselves, the Big Boss does it. And yesterday was one of those days where everything that could go wrong did go wrong.

It started out with me waking up late for the flight. I knew it! One of these days that would happen. I wasn't planning on sleeping at all, but ended up sleeping for a couple of hours. Unfortunately my alarm just decided to abandon its honorable duty and completely failed on me. I'm not sure how, but at 5 am, my eyes just opened and I knew that something has gone terribly wrong. I sprinted my way to my travel buddy's place to pick him up and went to the airport ASAP. We ended up being OK for timing, but apparently something else other than my wake up call had gone wrong. We were already in the plane, when the airport personnel announced that they had to get 5 people to volunteer to go on another flight because of plane overweight issue. If they can't get volunteers, they'll just start walking down the aisle and picking random people. Finally, 5 brave souls offered to get off, and off they went with their $400 Delta vouchers. That drama took a significant amount of time that we were running really close to the next flight's departure time. We landed in Detroit at 8 am, while the boarding time for our flight to LA was at 8 am. Needless to say, we needed to run. My travel buddy ran first because he didn't have to wait a while to get a check in luggage, and given that he's tall, he had a good chance of getting to the gate even faster and beg whoever to stall the flight for a few minutes until I came. I got my luggage and ran. That's when I thought back to the many times where I ate chips instead of doing a little jog, and regret it. That 15 minute run seemed like forever, what with me being unfit and all. The sms I got saying, "You need to run, they're closing the gate in 8 minutes," from my friend did help get my adrenaline pumped even more. And finally I reached the gate, and we were the last ones to go in. The plane couldn't take off immediately because it started snowing so it had to be defrosted for a while before going to the runway.

Once in LA we got about 3 to 4 hours of lay over, killed time by eating lunch and hanging out in a sports bar and then we went to our gate. One point in our meal I made a comment, "Weather looks fine, our plane seems to be here, I think this one's gonna be good." But of course not! There was a mechanical problem with the plane and they couldn't fix it. So, they are waiting for another plane coming from New York. Two hours later, finally we boarded. While in the plane, they announced that there is a problem with the catering because they have to the get the food from the old plane to the new one or something (by that time I was already tired and didn't care to listen well). But, an hour later, they announced that there was another mechanical problem on the new plane that needed to be figured out. Sigh... At least they seemed to be apologetic about it and gave us free movie access for the ride and $50 Delta voucher (which I was told might not be able to be used because they'd have crazy date restrictions). So, the flight ended up to be delayed for about 4 hours, before we finally took off.

So, finally, after a long day, at 10 pm, we said "Aloha!", as we landed safely in Kona, Hawaii. We went to the condo that was lent to us for the week and crashed. Well, I was actually still awake til 1 am, somehow. Another eventful day with Delta.