This trip to HNL was booked in April 2009 as an award ticket, 65k miles per person, with 2 people. We were originally leaving HNL on July 1st, but pushed that back to leave on July 2nd. Fast forwarding a bit, mom was not feeling like it was necessary to book the hotel yet, a few weeks in advance. When she was finally looking into it a week before the trip, it appeared to be that the Hilton Hawaiian village was sold out. Needless to say she deserved that one (we had gotten a recommendation from some family that went there a while ago). So she had to book a room at the Sheraton, and she was flip flopping with everything, really annoying me IMHO. A cancellation at the Hilton confirmed us there, and we were all set. Mom and I were originally looking into switching the trip so I could fly to ALB and have July 4th there, but that plan fell through later as there weren’t enough award seats. It would’ve cost $100 though according to the DL agent.

I printed the boarding passes out the night before, fully packed myself and was ready to go. I went to bed at midnight, couldn’t fall asleep. So I got about an hour and a half of sleep. I woke up to the alarm at 4 am; mom as usual needs to learn to take faster showers. We had a commitment to leave at 4:30 but we left at 4:45. We arrived at the airport 5:18 or so, went straight to the economy parking. We usually go central but she thought we needed to save some money. I calculated the difference and it was only $35 or so, I offered to pay for that portion of it (I hate that lot) to go park in central. She turned it down, so that’s where we were. As we entered the lot, a bus just left so I was already off to an annoyed day. We parked at the very far back corner, 5 minute walk to the bus, and a 15 minute wait there. We were on for 5 minutes to get to terminal A. Then we got off the bus, went up the escalator and straight to security. The medallion line (mom is a silver medallion – they don’t care that much) was longer than usual. I noticed the CLEAR line was just cut off since they shut down the other day. Just before going through the metal detector I realized that I still had my belt on, and took it off. After going through it didn’t turn up, so mom had to ask where it was. It came out a second later, and proceeded to move on.