Maui 2025 Part 1; The Background and the disastrous day at the airport

 As in all things that I post, I can’t just post about the thing itself, I must start with the backstory.

A couple of years ago, probably shortly before we moved to this house, I started to feel the desire to travel. Growing up I really never traveled, with the exception of school trips I took in high school. Leland never traveled either. We got married very young and travel was never important to us. I had so many friends serving missions and doing study abroads and single and childless and traveling the globe, meanwhile I was 20 years old with a newborn baby, cleaning up spit up and losing so much sleep it felt like I would never recover. 

In an effort to make myself feel a little better, living the unglamorous life of a young mother, I started to judge people who liked to travel. "What a waste of time and money!" I thought. Clearly I made the right, and more righteous, choice by spending what little money we had starting a family. As the years went on I still judged people who traveled as frivolous and vain, spending money that could be used helping people just to go relax on a beach somewhere. 

But as I got older, I read a lot, as I always have, and I started reading historical books, and I started thinking about how it would be fun to see some of these places in real life. 

In 2021, I had a very strange and urgent dream. I often receive light and revelation through dreams, but the subject of this one was strange, when I woke up I felt a pressing and urgent need to get passports for the whole family. 

So we did, at the end of 2021 we got our family of 7 all passports. I didn’t know why but we just did it and I didn’t even really have a desire to use them but I thought maybe we could go to Mexico or Canada before they expired in 5 years (for the kids). 

It took a couple years, in which we moved and had Sorrel, but the little seed of desire to travel started to grow in me. Maybe it was because we had the passports, maybe it was because I was influenced by social media, but I started to really desire to go on a big trip as a family, hopefully internationally. 

I started to recognize that maybe all travel wasn't just shallow and vain. We had by now travelled on several road trips throughout the western US and I could see just how influential those trips were for our bonding as a family and our family culture. As our kids were starting to get older I started to crave having meaningful memorable experiences with them. 

In January 2024 I was actually doing a health challenge, but a lot of the content was about mindset. We had one exercise on dreaming big and setting goals. It was then that I decided that we really COULD travel as a family if I set my mind to it. So I started researching affordable ways to travel, things like travel credit cards and flight subscriptions. 

Finally at the end of 2024 we found flights to Hawaii for an amazing price. Flights to Europe were still just slightly out of our financial reach, and we had always wanted to go to Hawaii, so we booked the flights! It felt so surreal. I think we booked the trip in December or January and we left for Hawaii in the middle of March. 

The morning we left there was a big snowstorm. Our flight was scheduled to leave at 7am, having us wake up about 4.  Leland dropped the kids and I off and went to park the van. Then we checked our carseats (we all took carry ons to save money) and got to our flight right as they were finishing boarding. 

We made it to our seats, stowed our dozens of carry ons (or so it felt like) and then we sat and sat, taxied around for a bit, and sat and sat. 

The kids were so excited! For most of them this was the first plane ride they could remember. BUT after about two hours of sitting on the plane they had us all get off because the crew had timed out, or worked too many hours in a 24 hour period. If this had been a bigger airline I think they would have easily found a new crew, but because this was a small budget airline, (Hawaiian) we were stuck. We ended up waiting around at the airport for 19+ HOURS until our flight was rescheduled at 1:40 am the next day. 

The kids were SO disappointed. They were crying that we would NEVER reach Hawaii. However it was a good lesson on resilience. They watched a lot of movies, visited just about every store in the airport and in the evening we all tried to sleep a bit. 

The airline did give us a  $50 food voucher per person so that was really helpful and fun for the kids to eat a bunch of food that we don't normally get. ("We each get a shake all to ourselves?!")

Airport chairs with the arm rests are horrible for sleeping. So we did find a place with benches where we could lay down. 

I brought a lot of fidget toys and activity books and those sure came in handy, not on the flights but during all the waiting. 

Finally it was time to board again, and maybe our disastrous first flight experience ended up being a blessing in disguise because our flight was empty so we could all lay down. We all slept great on the 7 hour flight AND the airline gave us each a $500 flight voucher for all the trouble, making it so that we will be able to visit Hawaii again next year! After the terribleness of this delayed flight faded from my memory, the flight vouchers have felt like a very tender blessing from Heavenly Father. 

But first on to the rest of the trip covered in the next few posts!