1-4-2014 From Sydney to Lihue, Kauai

"Today", January 4,  we spent a full day in Sydney, flew out at 9:40 p.m., flew for 10 hours east and arrived in Hawaii at 10 a.m. on January 4.  The time zone and international date line changes are confusing.

Knowing we were going to have such a long day, we slept in a bit and then went down to Darling Harbor in Sydney for the kids to play in Tumbalong park before we had lunch at Stacks.  They had an interesting item on the menu; "Lightly fried white  bait":

I asked the waiter what it was.  He said it was fried little fish and I decided to pass.

After lunch we went to a Circus Oz performance for a couple of hours and then took our final harbor cruise.  We noticed that the water level was particularly high with the deck of the wharf actually being several inches under water.

This is called a King Tide which happens twice a year when the earth, sun and the moon are all lined up in just the right (or wrong) way and the tides are at their highest for a couple of days.  The same thing happened in other coastal cities around the world.  Sights like this (and much worse) will be common with continued global warning.

Check in at the Sydney airport in the evening took a long time (especially for a Saturday evening) and then went even longer when we discovered that we had to go through Australian customs on the way out of the country.  I didn't see the point and have not encountered that before elsewhere.  We grabbed a hurried meal at McDonalds, sadly said goodbye to Amy, Justin and the G-Kids and then hustled down to our gate.  We were running so late that before we got to the gate they made an announcement over the loudspeaker that "David and Carol Suggs need to proceed to the Gate 61 immediately".

Our flights from Sydney to Honolulu and then on to Lihue went well.  By the time we got to our hotel in Lihue, the Grand Hyatt, it was about 3 and we decided to just hang out before going to dinner.  The Grand Hyatt in Lihue is huge but very nice and spread out over 50 acres so it doesn't seem too densely packed with people.  

This is the view from our ground floor balcony:

This is a view of the lobby part of the hotel from the beach:

And this is the beach:

Tomorrow, if the weather cooperates, we're going to take a helicopter flight, doors off, in the afternoon and drive to some waterfalls in the morning.