Originally posted on Facebook HERE

Coming at you from Kaua’i today. We’re no strangers to Hawaiian vacations, that’s for sure. Mostly Maui, but we’ve been to the Big Island, Lanai and Kauai before as well. And, of course — vacations like this involve travel.

You can learn a lot about yourself when you travel.

This was the first time we had major complications with a trip to Hawaii. We’ve certainly had complications with trips in the past, just none of the problems we have had in the past involved a Hawaiian vacation until this year.

This year? Started off when the Milwaukee to Denver flight was pushed back so far we couldn’t make the connecting flight from Denver to Kaua’i. Ugh… oddly enough, there was a Madison flight available almost the same time frame that wasn’t pushed back, so we called United and switched it. The Madison airport is awesome, so this wasn’t that bad of a change except our return flights are currently coming into Milwaukee and our car is now in Madison. Doh!…

The Madison flight had issues and left late but we still got to Denver with an hour before the Kaua’i flight was slated to leave. We boarded the plane, plane headed to the runway… and… stopped. And hung there while they started working on a “mechanical” issue with the plane… and we waited… and waited… and then they took the plane back to the gate. And we waited… and then they deplaned us. Uh-oh…

We got something to eat, and waited for updates… eventually they said they had to get us a new plane. At 4pm they cancelled the flight that was supposed to leave at noon. And rebooked us for a really late flight to LA followed by a long wait to leave for Kauai on Saturday. And the idea of doing that didn’t sit well with us, so we looked for other options and saw Southwest had a 7:30am flight to Las Vegas with a less than one hour turnaround for a flight to Kauai, and also found out that there was a Marriott actually in the Denver airport. So we cancelled the United flights and booked with Southwest and Marriott. That allowed us to watch the Brewers play game one in our room, get some sleep and fly on Saturday morning.

That all sounds pretty good, right? We got the flights switched, we got some sleep, everything all worked out all easy-peasy.

Except it wasn’t.

If you’ve ever been in these situations you know tensions run high, especially when you haven’t really eaten or slept well at all. You just wanna get on the damn plane and go! Waiting… waiting… waiting… then, when it’s clear you won’t be leaving — you gotta make some decisions pretty quickly. And my wife was all over the Southwest thing — but at the same time I was on the phone with United… and she’s pointing out stuff while they’re talking to me — and I think we were close to socking each other a couple times there 🙂

We were tired and hungry and pissed off that we’d be missing an entire day and still had to let the car rental and hotel know that, while leaving the fact that right now we’re scheduled to fly into Milwaukee when we get back and our car is in Madison to be handled another day.

You wanna see how well you deal with anger and frustration? Have your travel plans messed with.