Hawaii

Since Lane is not much to blog about these days I thought I would do a post on our honeymoon. It's somewhat random, but my sister just got back from her honeymoon and it prompted me to look through our wedding and honeymoon pictures during naptime.

This was us a few weeks after our wedding and a few weeks before our honeymoon. We waited until I was out of school to go. We had a little party at our house in Peoria where we opened our wedding gifts.

Besides for the fact that we spent TWO glorious weeks in Hawaii (Maui and Kauai), we also have a pretty cool (now that we know the outcome) story about the end of our honeymoon. Not a lot of people may know about it and it's interesting enough that Matt's been asked numerous times by his boss at different work meetings to share that story with the group.

Here are some pics...we look so young.

Getting ready to leave for the airport.

Matt taking in the fresh Hawaiian air. It smelled like flowers everywhere!

Black rock at Kaanapali Beach.

Nightly sunset ritual.

Maui

Eating lunch on our patio.

Hotel grounds. We stayed at the Sheraton Maui Resort and Spa.

Our car while we were in Maui.

Beer of choice Kona Brewing Co.

Cheers!

helicopter tour.

View from the helicopter.

We got to sit up front with the pilot which was cool, but I thought I was gonna throw-up the entire time. I didn't realize it would make me so sick. I have terrible motion sickness. Luckily I was able to hold it in until we got out of the helicopter, took a bus ride back to our car, and then as we approached our car I lost it! Yuck! But I was fine the rest of the day. I was even ready for lunch after that! LOL!

We went to a luau on the beach.

Did some sightseeing in town.

Saw numerous rainbows.

Then we hopped an island plane and went to Kauai for a few days.

We stayed at The Hilton.

Numerous bottles were sent to our room.

Of course we never declined!

And then it was time to say goodbye.

Our flight to Hawaii was direct from Chicago. On the way home we had a layover in L.A. It was practically a red eye. When we landed in L.A. it was close to midnight and we had a very short wait until we boarded Flight 1740. It was a bad flight simply because it was late. It's hard to sleep on planes and I do distinctly remember it being old and clunky. I was also used to the big and new airplane that we just got off of from Hawaii. We tossed and turned for nearly 4 hours and approached Chicago with relief.

Relief until we felt the plane pull back up as we came in for a landing. That was the scariest feeling ever! I just remember looking out the window and seeing everything getting smaller again when just seconds ago we could have touched the ground. Apparently we were doing a fly-by to traffic control and they confirmed that the landing gear was in-fact stuck and not coming down.

Everything was very quiet and confusing. It was also 6 am and people were groggy and tired. After 45 minutes of circling the lake, we were told that there was a malfuntion in the landing gear (READ: IT WOULD NOT COME DOWN) and then the flight attendants started yelling brace for impact over and over. I was looking at Matt in disbelief. What was about to happen was so unknown. We flew a little bit longer and coud tell we were approaching the runway again.

It was so scary I kept asking Matt if we were going to be ok. He was reassuring, but I could tell by the look in his eyes that he didn't really believe we would be ok. As we got closer to the ground, we floated a little bit and then BOOM! The nose of the plane hit the ground and we skidded for a few hundred yards. It was a rough landing but considering what he had to work with, it was pretty smooth. Miraculously the plane did not break in half, did not catch on fire, did not even skid off of the runway. We exited by stairway and were taken the rest of the way by bus to the airport.

You can read some articles here and here on the incident.

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