Of Hawaii

Sadly, we had to leave Shanghai without having sucked the eyeballs out of a fried pigeon head, or having seen a live cricket fight. We showed up at the airport, having carefully packed carry-on only in hopes that our precarious Kabul-Delhi-Guangzhou-Tokyo-Honolulu-Maui routing would go smoothly if we didn't tempt fate by checking luggage. No such luck - our Shanghai-Tokyo flight was cancelled. As we waited in the line snaking around the terminal to see what fate awaited us, The Lovely Katherine had fruitless phone conversations with Carlson Wagonlit, official travel agent and bureaucracy multiplier of your federal government. I stood by and tried not to think about the mountain of sichuan peppercorns I had eaten the night before. Lucky for us, despite Carlson Wagonlit being generally worthless, Delta Airlines (yes, that Delta Airlines) rebooked us on a China Air flight an hour later. Dear Carlson Wagonlit: You got outperformed by the Chinese airport employees of Delta Airlines.

Anyway, we made it to Tokyo, and after some time in the surprisingly boring Narita airport, made it to Honolulu, and then to Maui. Above, the view from our condo balcony, which made the airplane time easy to forget.