Dateline: Honolulu

Day 1

Flight from SFO on ATA ..

The good: Leather seats, experienced flight attendants, good food..
The bad: Seats SIX abreast on a frikkin 737, with legroom for hamsters, the aisle suitable only for supermodels on the fat free atkins. On a 5 hour flight, thats torture. Im pretty sure if they offered the $150 business class upgrade with seats 2 abreast and more legroom, half the folk on the plane woulda jumped at it.
Good thing the attendants took pity and gave me the emergency jump seats at the emergency exits. Yeah, god forbid people would have to GET out of the frikkin plane with those things blocking the aisle..

Landed, smiled at the blue skies in the open air walkways, walked out, caught a bus, any bus. TheBus.
I went the wrong way. Away from Honolulu. That was good. At the end of the line there was a 7/11. As Mars said - they had Spam musubi for 99 cents (1.09 wit tax).
The spam musubi was DAMNED good. Do they have a higher quality of spam in the islands? I dunno, but it tasted better than the fat congealed crap Ive had on The Mainland.
That was also pretty much the last of the good food. So far. (more on that later.)

And then, the part I dreaded - the search for a hotel.

Lets just say that if you walk around looking for a room at the inn, you'd better be carrying a card loaded for bear.
As the girl at the Pagoda Inn added it up so nimbly:

$130 standard rate, Hotel tax, visitor tax, deposit -- ah yes, $179 for the night. (Add gallic shrug here.)

Good thing I had previously met a drunk at the bus stop who told me of hostels 1 block from the beach that charged 22 bux a night, plus a 20 dollar deposit. For reals, as Sun would say.
Drawbacks? A few. Sharing a suite bunk bed style with 7 other people. Urg. Making sure yer stuff is secure. But dude, the halloween party was ROARING when I got there, with people from all over the US and the world having a DAMNED good time.

But all I wanted to do was get a shower and sleep.

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I lost 50 images of my arrival in H-town. Grr. I had to pick the bad machine with the virus at the internet cafe.

I took no laptop, instead lugging an external 2.5" drive as my backup (the ipod camera connector that apple sold me DOES NOT work with the iPod I have. Fuckers.)

I was trying to travel light. I even decided to pack like 3 days of clothes and 4 days worth of underwear. 1 bag.

I overpacked. All I needed was a backpack's worth of clothes. And even then.

But thats ok, I needed to learn that.