Yesterday morning, (after a night of very restless and limited sleep) we got up at 4:00AM Eastern time, did our morning activities and drove to Stewart Airport to catch a 7:30AM plane to Chicago. From Chicago, we'd be flying to the island of Maui, and from there we'd be hopping to Honolulu and then finally Kauai, our ultimate destination.

We hate to fly. First there's the security stuff (which cost me my beloved pen-knife the last time we flew anywhere and makes our Libertarian back-hair stand on end) and then there's the basic insecurity about when (or indeed, if) we will ever see our checked baggage again.

This time we had special reasons for concern: I booked the flight using CheapTickets (no, wait, there's more...) and the best itinerary it had presented me involved two American Airline flights and two Aloha Airline flights. But when I tried to book that intinerary, it replied that it could not because there was no cross-ticketing arrangement between the two airlines. So why did they present me with that itinerary?? Since the only flights that didn't involve those two airlines were more expensive and involved more time in transit, I decided to book the passage as two separate bookings.

So, of course, it occurred to me after the fact that due to this discontinuity of electronic ticketing information, there would almost certainly be a discontinuity in the baggage transfer as well. Now, ideally (having had bad experiences with these kinds of inter-airline transfers in the past), we would have claimed the baggage ourselves in Maui and personally carried it to the Aloha Air counter. But this just wasn't feasible because we only had 50 minutes between flights - not enough time to pick up the bags and go back through security (not to mention the fact that we really preferred to avoid another fuss with security).

So I called Aloha and asked them what I needed to do to insure a successful baggage transfer. The rep said that 50 minutes was actually below the minimum time that they required to do a baggage transfer, but that we'd "probably be all right", and that all we'd have to do is present the e-ticket receipt at the AA counter when we checked into our first flight and they could initiate the transfer. Ok, sounds reasonable. We packed a few days' clothes in our carry-ons, though.

So when we got to the AA counter that morning, imagine my delight at hearing the AA rep say that this was something that could not be done because the trips were booked on two different itineraries. I argued with him for a while, saying that the Aloha rep had said that this could, in fact, be done, so he finally passed me over to this other, older guy who seemed to find the scenario more feasible.

After fiddling around with the computer and mumbling a lot for about 15 minutes, the old guy informed us that he would have to write out the tags by hand (uh-oh... we all know how well special cases work). But things seemed to be going our way and we had a long long way to go so we left it at that and hoped that we would see our bags again someday.

The trip was long. Two hours from Stewart to Chicago. Then a two-hour wait between flights. Then the big one: nine hours from Chicago to Maui. Then the puddle-jumpers to Kauai. Right from the start of the first flight, Jenny was getting pretty nauseous. By the middle of the flight, she had to make use of the dreaded barf-bag (she went through a second one later). There was a lot of turbulence during all of the flights that we took that day.

When we got to O'Hare Airport in Chicago, she was still too nauseated to eat anything, and neither of us had had any breakfast. I had coffee and an apple fritter, Jenny looked miserable and said that she really would like to stay over and continue the rest of the flights tomorrow. Obviously, this would have been a huge deal at this point, so we pressed on.

The second flight was harder for me - again lots of turbulence, but this time I was the one who was getting nauseous. I was really feeling my lack of sleep now, dizzy and drained and going into and out of a cold sweat. But the one nice thing about a bad situation that there's nothing you can do about is that you don't have to figure out what to do. So I bit my lip and did the zen thing and managed to get through the rest of the flight without the barf-bag. Jenny, meanwhile, was feeling a lot better.

When we arrived at Maui, we made our way to the gate for our next flight and got our boarding passes. We spoke to the woman there about our precarious baggage situation. She looked at our baggage receipts and said that everything looked in order, but seemed doubtful that there would be enough time to get them to our flight. She said that most likely they would arrive on the next flight.

There was still daylight at this time - Hawaii is 5 hours behind New York. We sat through the two leg journey and were both pretty miserable at this point. We were very hungry (not having had an opportunity to get any real food for the past ten hours) and both had bad headaches, but we were in Hawaii.

When we finally arrived at Lihu'e airport in Kauai, we made our way to the baggage claim area and sure enough, our bags hadn't arrived. We took care of our car rental and returned an hour later to see if they arrived on the next flight, but still no luck. So we entered a report with the baggage counter and went off to find the place where we are staying - the Kiahuna Plantation. We stopped on the way for bad chinese food (since we still hadn't eaten) and got to the hotel room.

In spite of having bad headaches and being pretty frazzled and somewhat depressed, we both fell asleep pretty quickly. We woke up at about 1:30AM, at which time we heard the crowing of roosters. I remember thinking that it seemed rather odd for roosters to be crowing in the middle of the night - weren't they supposed to do that at dawn? It turns out that for some reason, the roosters here crow at all hours of the day and night. Quite impressive. And somewhat annoying.

We fell back to sleep, then woke up again at 5:30AM. A little more reasonable, but still earlier than we would have liked. Since it didn't seem likely that we were going to fall back to sleep again, we decided to get up and watch the sunrise from the beach.

Outside, the sky was still pitch-black and full of bright stars. We sat at the edge of the beach watching the black waves roll in until around 6:30, when we first noticed the sky getting lighter to the east. We didn't really see a very dramatic sunrise, some trees and hotels were in the way of that part of the skyline.

We went to the main office to sign in, got some breakfast at "Joe's on the Green" and when we got back I called up the airline baggage counter. We were pleased to learn that our baggage had been found in Honolulu (apparently it ended up on a Hawaiian Airline flight...) and that it would probably arrive in Kauai by noon, after which time it would be delivered to us.

We had to go back to the airport to exchange the rental car - the airbag light kept coming on and beeping at us. We had been upgraded to a Lincoln Town Car, which was a sweet ride but a just a tad "not us", and they gave us a Camry when we brought it in. On the way back we stopped at some shopping centers to try to find some sunblock, we got coffee and finally lunch, and then headed back.

When we got back, we decided to finally go to the beach. Po'ipu beach is a short drive away, a small stretch of reddish sand. I noticed there were a lot of people snorkeling out there - this kind of surprised me because generally beaches good for swimming are not very good for snorkeling and vice versa, and this beach had not been listed as one that was good for snorkeling.

What makes a beach good for snorkeling in my book is reefs. Lots of rocky reefs with colorful fish and coral formations. This kind of thing is not a lot of fun for people without snorkeling gear - you can really hurt yourself if you try to walk barefoot on it. I went down into the water, and sure enough, the sand turned to a rock shelf about 5-10 feet in. There was a little island about 15 feet out, and I had to make my way to it pretty much on all fours, cutting and scraping my hands and feet on the way. While I didn't explore the area extensively, I don't get the feeling that there was a lot to see under the water - it's just that the only way to get around it was to snorkel.

This portion of the beach was partially protected from the ocean by rock, making the water much calmer. Right nearby, across an outcropping, was another part of the beach that was exposed to the open ocean where the water was a lot more rough. People were surfing out in the distance, and families with small children were bobbing and boogey-boarding in the heavy waves. I guessed that they probably wouldn't be doing this if it were rocky underfoot, we went in and sure enough, rough water but smooth sand underneath. Jenny got to explore her inner mermaid out in the waves, and once again, my interest in learning to surf has been rekindled.

The rest of the night was spent on dinner, exploring the local fauna and making occasional calls to the baggage center to try to find out where our bags were. We finally were able to retrieve them from our condo's main office a few minutes before it closed. At this point, we were both tired so we went to bed. Things were looking a lot better than they had last night.