Tag Archives: airport

We made it home! Almost exactly 32 hours after we left the hotel “this morning”.

What a Tuesday. Anticipating going to bed in a couple hours, this day will have been 34 hours long. Plus 4 before we woke up, and 2 more after we went to sleep for total of 40 hours between 12:01am and 11:59pm on Tuesday Dec 12 from our perspective.

A single day that’s 40 hours long and 9000 miles wide. Now there’s an experience you don’t get to have too often.

Hopefully at least!

During our flight from Guam to Honolulu I sat next to a guy from Saipan who was leaving the islands for the first time. Hawaii was impressive to him, I can’t imagine what he’s thinking now, having gone through LA and landed in Seattle where he’s going to try and get set up. The island he lived on is slightly less than half the length of Guam, at only 14 miles. From the single high spot you can actually see the whole island he says.

And our Lyft ride home from the airport was 24 miles, almost the entire length of Guam.

Sometimes the scale of things just really gets you.

I hope that guy enjoys Seattle. I assured him he did NOT in fact have to worry about frostbite upon arrival.

Kitties got up to some shenanigans while we were gone and got themselves into some places they’ve never gone before. Whoops! Learning for next time.

We’ll try and post a few more things in the next few days as we go through all the pictures from the other phones as well. But for now: we’re home, and ready for a nice sleep with actual lying down and such. What luxury. Almost like we’ve been upgraded to first class!

We’re currently in Honolulu airport, where it is once again Monday. Oh joy, we get to experience 4am Tuesday morning for a 2nd time, just what I wanted.

The morning got a late start because we were enjoying snorkeling and swimming in the bay. I do wish we had pictures of that, but we really don’t like to be the people with the GoPro firming everything, rather than enjoying it. The bay is lonely though we were 100-152 yards off the beach, and the water was never too deep for me to stand up. (and thus for Bevin or Caren to use me as a platform if needed.) The water is clear enough that you can just look down and see the fish swimming around, but it does get truly spectacular when you get the goggles on and see it from below. I’m certain there are plenty of videos of snorkeling in Tumon Bay available on YouTube if you really want to see!

Since we got a late start we weren’t able to do the breakfast at the hotel and had to wait to get lunch. This turned out to be excellent because their lunch had some great items, including a local dish called Kelaguen that they did a very good job of, in fact the best version we’ve had since arriving!

After lunch Caren and Bevin and I went to the Guam Aquarium. We weren’t expecting much, based on the reviews and seeing the entrance (it’s in a mall) but it was really pretty great! I think they have the longest walk-through aquarium tunnel I’ve ever seen!

Our last day was going to be just mostly sitting around, perhaps some swimming, but some early morning internet sleuthing uncovered a few extra family graves, including one that was quite important to Dave: Auntie Bita.

Unfortunately he never knew anything else about her, so we could never find her. Didn’t even know what the true relation was. It’s possible she was just a family friend. All we knew was that her headstone had ten picture in the upper right. She was a very important figure in his childhood though, and he was very much hoping to find her.

Well Marcia and her Ancestry account did!

It turns out that “Auntie Bita” was actually Great-aunt Rita, and she’s buried just a few headstones down from her sister, Dave’s paternal grandmother, Maria Taitano Aguero. We literally walked right by her last time we were at this cemetery and didn’t notice the picture. (Dave had remembered seeing a picture of a dark headstone, so hadn’t looked at this one.)

One further bit of research that was accomplished in the morning was finding out the actual neighborhood that Dave’s grandparents used to live in! He remembers it being across from a schoolt we had visited all the local schools and not found in. Narrowing down the search grid to about 5 blocks though we were able to determine what is now a park/playground used to be a school, and we found his grandparent’s house!

When we drove by someone was in the font yard, so Dave hopped out to talk to him! It turns out that the guy’s parents are neighbors, and bought the house from the Agueros! He and Dave chatted for a bit while we watched the neighborhood roosters run around. (they’re like squirrels! They’re just everywhere!)

We did a little more last minute souvenir shopping and picking up some things we needed before heading back to the hotel.

Eventually we went back to Meskla, clearly our favorite restaurant since this was our third trip, and had nome more delicious quasi-local food.

After dinner it was back to finish packing and turn in so we could get up at 4. Bevin and I went on a walk down the beach though. It’s really quite lovely out there in the dark, but there were a surprising number of loudly drunk people. There’s some kind of flying fish in the bay though that only comes out at night, and skips along the surface like a skipping stone. And tons of little schooling fish that come right up to the tide line.

Unfortunately it’s even harder to get pictures on the water at night, so you’ll just have to take our word for it. 😎

We survived the flight from Guam back to Hawaii without too much difficulty. It was a bit ahead of schedule due to 100mph tailwinds and cut about an hour off the time.

So here we sit in Honolulu, 12 hours after leaving our hotel, waiting for our 11pm flight, and 11 hours away from touching down in Portland. On this flight we have the entire middle column of the 777.

It’s 5am Tuesday morning and we’re headed to the airport. I expect to be at home in bed in Texas by 10pm Tuesday evening, 34 hours from now.

That’s a lot of Tuesday.