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I doubt there’s anyone who reads this who did not know that Teri and I went to Hawaii at the end of August. The lure of $10 roundtrip air fare and a free condo stay were hard to resist, especially compared with the other option we were considering: the dark wet Highlands of Scotland.

We flew to the Big Island where we spent a week touring around the island, spending most of the time in Teri’s parents’ Kailua cond but also with one night in Hilo so that we could check out the volcano at our leisure. After that we took an inter-island plane to Maui where we spent four days in a hotel exploring the area around Lahaina.

We did way too much to list it all here but some highlights:

• awesome sunsets
• delicious Mai Tai’s
• gorgeous beaches
• Kilauea
• Maui Ocen Centre
• standing at the southern most point of the USA
• and of course spending time with my sweet wife

There are a lot of photos to look at but all the ones I took are in my Hawaii 2009 Collection on Flickr. Teri has been uploading hers to Flickr also but she is not complete yet, I will post her link when she is done.

Mahalo.

I’m usually pretty slick when it comes to making travel bookings, I love sniffing out the best deals, playing websites against each other, trying out all the possibilities. But I’ve made a small boo boo for our trip to Hawaii in a couple of weeks.

I was looking for a car rental for the week we are on the Big Island and found a good deal with Enterprise for a convertible but their office is not open when we arrive from LA. So I figured we’d pick it up next day but at the last minute thought about checking Hotwire to see if I could get a better price. I put in the times and it came up with an even better rate for the Convertible so I booked it – score!

But it wasn’t with Enterprise like I was expecting, it is with Alamo which is absolutely fine except that their office is open until midnight. I could have booked the car pickup for when we arrive – no need to cab it to our condo and then back to the airport. For an extra $35 we could have had it from hour 0.

Grrr… I hate it when I screw up.

I am finally done with the crazy travel of the last couple of weeks, and as much as I usually love to travel you won’t find me getting in a plane any time soon (unless it’s me at the controls). In the last 2.5 weeks I have flown on 11 flight legs, landing in Baltimore, New York, Phoenix, San Diego, Los Angeles, London, and Amsterdam. My business trip to Europe included just over 24 hours of actual flying time (plus who knows how much time waiting in airport lounges) but I spent only 21 hours in a work office or meeting!

Anyway, we had a really good time in New York and there may be some posts on that later. In the meantime, if you missed them you can check out some photos here and here.

Not much to report from the London and Amsterdam visits, least not much that isn’t prohibited by an NDA, but I did take a few snaps of my hotel and some of Amsterdam city. You can see these here.

So no more travel for a while, I think, though if I had gotten back from Europe a day or two earlier I probably would have been going to Seattle today for 2 days for some more meetings. I am definitely glad I am not.

Arrived back from Alaska in the wee hours of the morning after a long day’s traveling (though nothing compared to my Dad’s). No near-naked girls to report this time, instead a broken water heater leaking into the garage; just never possible to ease back into reality it seems. Hopefully the plumber man will return to install the new heater any moment, he needs to as we have piles of laundry like you wouldn’t believe.

Obviously there will be more Alaska posts to come. Right now I am sorting through 896 pictures to come up with those worth keeping. I’ll post some here but you’ll need to check out my flickr page to see them all.

Toodles for now.

This past weekend I flew Teri to Camarillo for a surprise trip to Santa Rosa Island. The island lies 40 miles off the coast of Ventura and I had signed us up for a tour with Channel Islands Aviation who would fly us there, and arrange for a guide.

The self-flying was fun, including a return trip with only one working brake, and you can read about it on my flying blog if you wish.

I can heartily recommend the tour. The island feels quite isolated and is beautiful with untouched beaches and rolling hills, just beware the high winds and the hunters (though hopefully they will be gone in 2011). We had a great guide, Inge, a volunteer with the National Park service who had a great passion and knowledge for the island. The trip across the sea to the island was also fun, our pilot Curtis skilfully brought the plane down on the dirt strip in very high winds and thanks to several people not showing up he was able to join us for the tour.

To the pictures I took, click on the photo above or go to this link to my flickr photoset.