A Long Flight...Saturday, June 6th, 2009

Finally landed in Palau with no problems. Had a slightly different flight plan than last year but we all made it in one piece and none of our luggage went missing (exceptional for changing planes 4 times). We hit the roads of VA at about 3:00am on the 5th and boarded our first flight in Washington National to Houston at about 6:00am and landed in Houston about 3 hours later. We had about a 1 hour layover and then boarded a flight to Honolulu which took a long 8 hours. I tried to pass the time with little naps inbetween listening to my iPod or watching the complimentary personal video system that each seatback had. As Jim had said, "once you see the Pink Panther twice you know you are in for a long flight". We finally landed in Honolulu and
deboarded to reboard about an hour later. Back in the same seats with the same repeating shows. We were in for another 8 hours flight. We landed in Guam and had a layover for about an hour then boarded a smaller plane which went to Yap and Koror. We had to stop in Yap, deboard and wait in a very tiny airport terminal for about 45 minutes just to reboard the same plane. About 1 hour more and we landed in Palau, met up with Sam's Tours bus driver, loaded our baggage and got to the hotel. First thing i did was take a long shower and brush my teeth, then unpacked and got all my dive gear together for our first dive the next morning. I got to bed about midnight and slept well until i woke up at about 5am. Remember, Palau is 13 hours ahead of current VA time so we pretty much lost two days with all the flying and time zones.