Seattle to Kona

Saturday morning we caught our Lyft driver at 0500 for an easy ride to SeaTac airport to start our vacation in Hawai'i. I've found that if I'm going to be gone for less than a week it pays to park at the airport, but if it's longer than a week it's less expensive to take a ride share each way. This morning it cost $51.36 plus tip for the ride.

Our flight to Honolulu was rough from takeoff to a couple hours out when it smoothed out for the balance of the trip. It seems the seats are narrower and the legroom less each flight, but the seat configuration on this 737 was not bad. We checked our carry-on bags at the gate so we had only our personal items to worry about and I put them both in the overhead rack so we had the max legroom.

This vacation starts with a week on the Big Island so you might wonder why we flew to Honolulu. It turned out that the round trip SEA to HNL plus the inter-island trip from HNL to KOA and return was a couple hundred dollars less than the open jaw from SEA to KOA to HNL back to SEA. The downside was that we had to pick up our checked luggage, exit the international terminal where we arrived and go through security again at the Inter-island Terminal, about a ten minute walk around the drive.

Honolulu International is relatively old and is mostly an open air terminal.

Still in the secure area, this shot shows the apron and arrival gates.

Here we look to the right at a nice garden in the terminal. 

This shot is taken facing back to the breezeway where I took the shot above. 

Inside the inter-island terminal. We had lunch in the restaurant center background. Lots of  birds from
doves to small sparrows ended up coming into the terminal and not being able to find their way back out.

Despite the bird guards, the birds manage to find a place to perch and leave their marks.

When I booked our connecting flight from Honolulu to Kona I had to allow for possible late arrival of the flight from the mainland, time to make our way out of the secure area, go back through security and into the inter-island terminal. Our flight from Seattle was a little early and it only took an hour and a half to schlep our selves and our bags between terminals so we had a couple hour wait before the flight to Kona. But I like to have extra time rather than the opposite. We relaxed over lunch and enjoyed the short flight to Kona.

These three Hula girls have been dancing in the Kona airport courtyard since the new airport opened in 1970.

Picked up our rental car from the helpful people at Enterprise and made our way to our condo after a long travel day.

We were tired but not too tired to catch the sunset on our first day of vacation.