All of us were awaken very early with weather alerts going off on our phones. This was the message that we received:
Thankfully our house sat on high enough ground that we knew that we wouldn't be affected so we all were able to go back to sleep for a while before getting up for breakfast. Then since we would have free time for the day until our flights began to leave, we loaded up into the vans and drove over to a local town that had a place called "The Warehouse" and we all took some time to do some window shopping. It was a neat little place with a lot of cute things, but a little pricey for my type of souvenir shopping. LOL
Aren't these just the cutest little baby surfer clothes though?
I offered to buy the girls this book about Hawaiian Lifeguards...
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In all honesty, most of us didn't want to do very much shopping and we all decided just to go back to the house so that we could eat lunch and then use our last hours together to talk with each other and just enjoy our last hours together. Many of us took showers. I took a nap beside the pool. Several of the wives finished their books. The guys played an intense game and then the loser had to jump into the freezing cold pool. I think we watched a little basketball on tv, which was the first time that the tv was on all week. And then we spent the last few moments down by the ocean where we took in one of our favorite views.
Noel and I had the same flights as three of the other couples so all of us would load up into the vans and head over to the airport. Our flight would leave the island at 9:15. After we left, the ones that remained at the house would send us a couple pictures of the sunset. We missed out on a pretty amazing one that night.
And then they sent this picture from the back wall. It's like it was our one last look...
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The Lihue airport is pretty small with only ten gates so once we got there and checked in, we didn't have very far to walk to cover one end of the airport to another. We tried to walk back and forth as much as we could however, since we knew that we'd be on that red-eye flight to Las Vegas for over five hours.
Did you know that service animals often get their own bathrooms at these airports? Unfortunately for them, this one didn't offer a lot of privacy but in Las Vegas, I saw an animal bathroom that actually had individual stalls with fire hydrants included. LOL
It would probably be the most turbulent flight of our entire trip and neither Noel or I got any sleep at all on that part of the trip. It as already a long flight and then due to the turbulence, we had to stay seated and the flight crew had to also stay seated. And even though we were suppose to have more leg room on this flight, it was just impossible to get comfortable. We finally arrived in Las Vegas around 2:30 their time and then we sat for about two hours more before making our final connection to Indy. At the Las Vegas airport, we were at least entertained and kept awake with a lot more people coming through the airport and some even stopped to play the slot machines.
Las Vegas is also where I saw Lilly King, the American gold medalist swimmer who swam competitively at Indiana University and is one of the best breaststrokers of all time. She was standing behind us in the boarding line and would fly with us on the same flight to Indy. Don't worry, despite the fact that I tried to nonchalantly take pictures of her to show the girls, I didn't actually approach her or embarrass myself in any way around her. LOL
Final view of Vegas with the mountains in the background.
As soon as I got on the plane and tucked my carry-on below my feet, I closed my eyes and I think I was out before we even took off. After being up for over 20 hours, I managed to sleep for the entire 3.5 flight and I woke up just as we started our descent into Indy. Imagine my dismay when I heard the pilot say that it was 27 degrees in Indianapolis on Sunday and snow was falling.
Welcome back to Indiana!!
We had left our coats in our car, which was back at the hotel, so it was downright cold when we left the airport. 'Thankful for heated shuttle buses and our friends who drove us to our car rather than making us wait for the hotel to pick us up.
The view from our back porch when we arrived home. This came after a week of temps in the high 60's back home in IN and all of the snow had already melted. This was all brand new snow that had come overnight as we made our way back home. 'Definitely a different back porch view than what we had experienced during our week in Hawaii.
Hawaii was beautiful and it was such a wonderful blessing to us to have a full week to just rest and to enjoy a little time away. I really needed that downtime and I am so grateful to Brent and Karen for opening up their home and blessing us in that way. We pray that they will be blessed abundantly in return.
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But as soon as we pulled in the driveway and walked into the house, I realized what an immense blessing it also was to walk in to a home, my beautiful home (that was still standing after nine days away BTW) and to see all four of my beautiful healthy children sitting together. Morgan and Marissa had come home for the weekend to hang out with the younger two and I'm glad that they waited around long enough for Noel and I to get back home so that we could see them. We shared our freeze-dried jolly ranchers with them, (they weren't impressed) and we shared a couple of stories of our trip.
Aloha Hawaii. Until next time.
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