The Long Flight

Sunday, June 8, 2008 – Monday, June 9, 2008

Sunday morning at about 3:03 my alarm goes off. I snooze till about 3:15 then get up, shower and give all my luggage a final check. Joe and is brother Jim pick me up at about 3:45 am and we are off to Dulles Airport. Joe and I meet up with Andy, who has been at the airport since 3:45 am, at 4:15 am. We get our bags checked and make our way to the terminal. Our flight was on time from Dulles to Houston. We board a “puddle jumper” at about 6:00 am and after an hour and 40 minutes we land in Houston with about an hour layover until we board a 767 to Honolulu. The layover went quick and we then boarded the on-time, 8 hour flight to Honolulu. We were not able to get seats together which was OK but I ended up in the middle row on an aisle seat…6D. Was really hoping for a window seat but I was still able to take a peek here and there. I tried to get some sleep and was successful at snoozing for a bit here and there. Just put my iPod on and zoned out. We finally landed in Honolulu and had another 1 hour layover to get back on the same plane and take a 7 hour flight to Guam. I did not want to sit for another 7 hours. Again I tried to get some sleep but wasn’t as easy this time. Not much to tell about that flight as we just sat there. After what seemed like forever we landed in Guam. Beautiful but HOT and humid. We had a 2 hour layover and relaxed, streached and prepared for about a 2 hour flight into Koror, Palau. That flight went pretty quick with the exception of the delay once on board. There was a malfunctioning light that the maintenance guys had to check out and make sure there was nothing majorly wrong before take off. We waited about an hour then set for the skies. We landed in Palau at about 8:50 pm, about 27 hours after we left VA. We got our luggage, went through customs with no issues and met up with our driver to take us to West Plaza hotel. We got in about 20 minutes later and checked into our rooms.

Our rooms are decent, I have a two bedroom room with a small balcony. There is a little slot for where you place your key holder that turns on the electricity, fan, light, AC etc. Once you take the key holder out, everything turns off so it gets a bit stuffy during the day when we are out. It does cool down pretty fast though. I slept great the first night but got up quite early. Met up with Joe and Andy at about 7 am and went across the street to the Red Rooster and had breakfast. I just had a couple eggs and toast. I didn’t want to fill up too much since we were going to be diving in the next couple hours. After lunch, we went back to our rooms and finished getting ready to meet up with the driver to take us to Sam’s Tours dive center.