Holiday to Hawaii in Aug 2013: Day 13 – Maui OGG to Honolulu HNL

By Nige on Tue 03 Sep 2013 at 14:00
Type: Post
Story: Holiday to Hawaii in Aug 2013
Tags: Dollar | Hilton | HNL | Honolulu | Maui | Mustang | OGG

Our last inter-island flight was scheduled for 9:20am, so we had to be up at a reasonable time to shower, do final packing, pick the car up, drive to the airport, drop the car and still have time for a Starbucks at the airport prior to boarding.

As tough a job as it gets for a project manager on holiday!

Said good bye to our blue Mustang – it had served us very well in some very tough terrain, and it didn’t flinch once.

The flight was fine – nothing more significant can be said about it. These inter island flights only take 30 mins. It’s more like getting on a bus.

By the time the plane has reached it’s cruising altitude (probably no more than 10,000 feet), they have to throw out some juice and water (it’s a bonus if you can catch it), everyone’s buckled up again for the descent and landing.

We organized a last minute Dollar car from Honolulu airport since it was cheaper to do this than pay a shed load in taxi fares.

I used my new Dollar Express membership to bypass the long queue for picking up, and avoided the upsell which annoys people so much.

Got a nice little Focus with all the gadgets on board. We managed to get back to the Hilton Hawaiian Village with little or no problems.

Used the old sales patter to get an upgrade into the Ali’i Tower. It took us 20 mins of compliments to the really nice check in agent to get us the upgrade.

Seems like the resort is fairly quiet since we got an ocean front room on the 13th floor.

Great room – had an electric loo where you could control the temperature of the seat (!), have a auto wash on the front or the back, vary the temperature of the water and whether it oscillates or not, and then dry everything off without getting up. Very enjoyable I have to say.

In the early afternoon we drove to Diamond Head and walked up – steep climb and we were soaking wet with sweat by the time we went back down again, but fabulous 360 degree views up there.

Followed that up with a walk out from the hotel to a few shops and on to The Cheesecake Factory for dinner. Fabulous Pina Coladas. We were going to go there on our last night in Hawaii, but tomorrow is Pearl Harbor day, so we may well be knackered.

Got back in plenty of time to watch the sunset and fireworks from our room, and rent “Now You See Me” on video. Vick actually stayed awake through the entire film as well!

Looking forward to a good day tomorrow.

Follow the whole story here: Holiday to Hawaii in Aug 2013