Aloha from Maui, Hawaii! Today begins our first full day in Maui. Getting here was fairly uneventful. Mckell picked Steve and I up about 5:45 AM and took us to the airport. Everything you read on the internet says to give yourself at least 2 hours to go check your bags, go through security, etc. but it only took us about 40 minutes to do everything leaving us waiting to board our plane for a little over an hour. We then flew into LAX getting there with about an hour to get to our connecting flight to Maui. Things got a little interesting here. First off, that airport is fucking huge. It took us what seemed like an hour just to taxi from the runway the terminal. Anyway, we get there and no one at Delta can seem to tell us where our next flight was leaving from. Finally she thought she figured it out and told us we needed to go across the entire airport to another terminal. Since she didn't seem to know what she was talking about we decided to try to figure it out on our own, which didn't work. In the process though, these two really strange guys walked up to us in our terminal and sounding almost retarted asked us where we're going and tried to make small talk with us, we basically ignored them and went on our way. About 40 minutes until our other flight was going to leave we found out that our flight was one of two terminals, the problem being, each terminal has it's own security so if we went to the wrong one, there would be no way we could make it to the other terminal in time to catch our plane. As we left our terminal, once again the weird guy was standing there and asked us where we were going. We thought it was a little weird, but it get's weirder. Luckily we ran into a nice colored man who was driving a rental car shuttle and knew exactly where we needed to go to catch our flight. Not only did he know, but he told us he would get us there as fast as he could instead of making us take the airport shuttle which took a long time to get all the way across the airport. We gave him a few bucks for the help and found the ticket counter for our connecting flight. They gave us our tickets, and sent us on our way. As we stood in the security line, which was really long and looked as if it was going to take at least 40 minutes or so I looked down at our tickets and realized they had started boarding the plane 10 minutes ago and it was scheduled to take off in 10 minutes. We panicked and tried to run past everyone but some lady saw us and told us we had to go to the back. Instead of going to the back we asked a few guys going to Denver if we could get in line with them and go through security. They let us but the bitchy lady that told us to go to the back almost didn't. Luckily they did and we went through security. Here's where things get weird. As we're leaving the same guy that we had seen 2 times already and who was acting really weird was standing right behind the security exit letting everyone pass. Right when we get to him, he once again was like "Hey man, where are you guys going?". Now there is NO way someone could have gone from our first terminal to that terminal and beat us through security, we raced there, cut in line and this guy was still waiting for us at the end. The only thing we can think is that they were suspicious of the tie-line (the thing we use to broadcast back to SLC) that I was carrying on and thought it could be a bomb or something. We assume this guy was some kind of under cover security of police and was trying to burn us or just let us know in a discreet way. Anyway, we got luck and our plane was running really late so we made the flight, but ended up getting into Maui almost an hour and a half late because the plane was running so late.
We finally got into Maui about 3 PM local time and after getting our bags, our rental car, etc. finally got out of the airport about 4:15. All I can say is Hawaii is amazing. It reminds me a lot of Cancun, Mexico, just a lot more tropical feeling. Instead of desert and sand, all you see here is green, everything is green. Basically all we have done since we got in is work as of now. Yesterday we had to test our equiptment and make sure everything had been set up right. Then we ate and came back to our hotel to nap before our broadcast at 2 AM Hawaii time. We did the broadcast, got back to our hotel and took another nap. I woke up from that about 1/2 hour ago and now we're just about to leave to go down to Lahaina (where all the restraunts, bars, etc. are around here) and check things out. I've been taking pictures all morning and will post them to my site tonight. Until then, mahallo...
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peaceful.