Spring Break - Big Island - Day 3

Wednesday morning, Randy & I got up early and got ready to go to the temple.  We left the kids sleeping in the hotel with strict instructions not to leave the room.  I was nervous about leaving them but just had to have faith that it would be ok since we were going to the temple.  It was literally 5 minutes from the hotel and we left a phone with Halen just in case.  Believe me, the minute I got back to the dressing room, I had to text him to make sure things were ok.  Of course they were.  But the Kona temple was absolutely beautiful...tiny, but beautiful.  We've been to some small temples before but this one was the smallest by far.

Temple #44 for Randy, #42 for Alena

The was a cruise ship docked just down the hill from the temple

The cruise ship just down the street

We went back to the hotel to change and pack up to check out.  After we left the hotel, we took the kids over to the temple to walk around for a minute.

Mia found a pretty flower & a seashell

Love this family of mine!!!

Our original plan was to spend the day in Kona sightseeing before taking a flight back around 8:00 that night but like I said before, when you fly standby, you have to be flexible.  There was a huge snowstorm that cancelled a bunch of flights in Denver and Salt Lake which messed a lot of other flights up so we could see we needed to take an earlier flight to be able to at least make it back to the mainland so we ended up leaving about 3:00 instead on a flight to San Francisco.  We were sad to have to cut our day short but we didn't want to get stuck in Hawaii...although that doesn't sound too bad. :)

Mia doing "heart hands" at the airport

Mia took this pic as we took off...just lava around the runway

Since we left Kona earlier than planned, we got to San Francisco earlier that planned.  We thought we'd fly through the night and only have to wait in SFO for a couple hours before catching a flight to Salt Lake but instead we got to SFO about midnight and had to wait like 7 hours for our next flight so we got to spend the night in the airport.  This is actually one of the kids main memories of the trip so I guess it wasn't that bad.  Needless to say, we didn't get too much sleep...Halen didn't sleep at all.

Mia & Alex passed some of the time playing on the moving walkways

Mia slept on the seats w/ a towel for a blanket while Alex slept under

Halen might have dozed off for a minute but not much

So once we got to San Francisco, we realized how messed up all the flights were from the storm.  Our flight to Salt Lake wasn't going to work out any more so we took a flight to Medford, OR where we waited for about 4 hours before catching a flight to Salt Lake.  Everyone but Halen was able to sleep a little bit on each of those flights but then we still had to drive home from Salt Lake so it was a really long day and we couldn't wait to go to bed.  Ahh, the joys of flying standby!  All in all, it was a really fun trip and now the kids can say that they've been to Hawaii.  It was some great family time!