These are my notes from our Wedding trip to Hawaii. I plan to post up
a blog post for each day and backdate them so they are on the correct
date in the calendar. I also notice that I don’t really write
interesting posts, and stick mostly with just a “what we did, what we
ate” kind of approach. That’s too bad; I would love to write more
interesting, introspective, and emotional entries, but it turns out
that I just naturally do a more simple and boring documentation.

We left for Hawaii on Saturday evening, 2009-05-16. Sadly, the day
before I started to get sick. At about 3pm in the afternoon I came
down with a splitting headache, after having a sore throat all
morning. This was bad because I don’t like being sick, airplanes
usually dry my throat out as it is, and worse, the first two cases of
H1N1 Influenza spread by person-to-person contact between people who
had not been out of the country had just been confirmed on the news.
I was worried that they would not let me out of the country. Or
back. Or something.

That evening was pretty tough, but at least we didn’t have to leave
early. Our flight out wasn’t until about 9pm. We did some pre-travel
shopping, packed up, and just barely made it to Shinagawa in time to
catch our Narita Express. In the end though we made it. The trip
through the airport was as usual, but nobody pulled me out or accused
me of being sick (even though I was.) We made it on the plane though,
no problem.

We flew ANA, which was nice. Very good service. The flight was about
8 hours. I couldn’t sleep, but I did watch Gran Turino, a very good
movie. They were running a whole Clint Eastwood marathon, with a
bunch of his movies. I spent a lot of time playing “Lord of the
Rings: Battle for Middle Earth” – I only made it through the first two
missions. It seems like a pretty good game, but I don’t really like
real time strategy games. I want to take my time and plan out moves.
Basically, I like turn based games. Still, I guess I have to get
dragged into the 20th century at some point or another, so I might as
well try to get used to the real time strategy paradigm.

The landing was really tough: because of my cold I was congested, so
changing altitude was really tough on me. I thought my head was about
to explode, or at least my eardrums. I did manage to get through it,
although my nose did start bleeding a bit. Great. When we landed in
Hawaii, happily, nobody pulled me over for being sick. Maybe I didn’t
look as bad as I felt.