2011-Feb 10---Travel day:  STL-DFW-LAX-LIH


This was a day of travel. American Airlines have changed their award travel policies, so our trip was longer then usual. Now they don't allow a "stop over" of more then 4 hours at a time without charging for 2 award travel tickets. So instead of flying non-stop to LAX and having a 5 hour layover before our Kauai flight, we had to leave STL earlier and fly to DFW, then LAX for a combined layover of about 6 hours. So with 6 hours of layover, 2 hours to DFW, 4 hours to LAX, and another 6 hours to Kauai, it was a long day. At least all the flights were on time so we arrived in Kauai about 8:30 (actually a little early). In DFW, they were looking for volunteers to check their luggage for free, so we checked our carryon (all that we travel with anymore except when we fly on Southwest where luggage still goes free). Upon our arrival, I took off to get our Pontiac G6 rental car from Budget ($440 for the 15 days this year) while Ken waited for our luggage. He was at the curb when I got back with the car and we were off to Kapaa within about 15 minutes of landing. Checked into our condo, set up our internet to email our safe arrival to the kids back home, then headed off to Safeway. It's part of our routine to get us into the new time zone quicker. Dinner was a $9 sub sandwich from Safeway. I think we managed to stay up until about 11pm, then hit the sack.