Unexpected return to mainland

Without going into too much detail; we were forced to cancel the remainder of our trip due to a family emergency back home. In case you've ever wondered just how people get home in situations like these ...

The day starts off like any other; beautiful weather and a tasty breakfast on the patio. I don't need to check in for my windsurfing lesson until 9:30, but we arrive at the shop shortly before nine. It's not even open yet so we're waiting in the car when suddenly the phone rings.

Neither one of us is thinking clearly, but we're only a short drive from the airport so we head over there to try and secure a flight, but there's no travel agency at the airport and even though we could've booked with one of the airlines directly we wouldn't know if someone else had a faster connection.

I try to find things on my phone as we're driving back to our "B&B," where our host hands us the local yellow pages. We explain the whole situation to one of the travel agencies then wait for them to get back to us. Finally we call them again only to find out they did do a search, they just never called us back. Really?! Meanwhile the one flight I'd found on my phone has disappeared and all that's showing up are flights leaving late at night.

I change my search around and start looking for flights to cities on the west coast, and in another window search for flights from the west coast to home. It's a risk because if you miss your connection they have no obligation to help out, but what else can we do? And no, these last-minute flights were not cheap!

Flights booked we rapidly throw all our belongings in our suitcases, say goodbye to our fabulous hosts and hurry back to the airport. Once there we make the decision to also check the suitcase we normally bring as a carry-on and to have all our luggage labelled all the way through.

Security is a nightmare! I don't know why but the line stretches all the way through the terminal and it's hard to stay calm when it's really important that you get on the plane. There's no time to get food before boarding the plane and our plans to eat during our layover in Honolulu don't work out either. We sit down in some kind of grill, but they say the food won't be ready in time so instead I get a bag of chips from the machine ... I then promptly step on on the bag which sends them scattering all over the floor.

As a last resort we buy some questionable looking sandwiches from Starbucks, but they really are yucky and we have to force ourselves to eat even half of it.

To our surprise they do serve dinner on the flight to Los Angeles and even though it's obviously airplane food the vegetable curry isn't half bad.

When we boarded the plane we alerted one of the flight attendants to our situation and she was able to reseat us close to the front of the plane for landing. I wish I knew her name because if not for her we would've never made our connection.

She gives us directions to terminal six, but we're both fried and frazzled and we're running around like chickens with our heads cut off. Why oh why did we have to land in the terminal that's farthest away from our connecting flight!?! There's supposed to be a shuttle but we can't figure out where it stops or how often it runs and we're scared to stop and try to find someone who knows so there's nothing left to do but run, run, run until we can run no more and then run some more.

The flight is already boarding when we reach the counter and we haven't even gotten our boarding passes yet. There's only one person in line ahead of us; he also wants to get on the flight but he has bags that need to be checked so there's nothing they can do for him --- he missed the flight.

Things aren't looking much better for us, especially since we don't have boaring passes but after a few terse moments where we explain everything again they place a call to the gate and we get the OK as long as we hurry through security. Fortunately things are moving faster here and even though we still don't get a chance to get a proper meal in at least we are able to catch the plane.

Our last layover is also the shortest, but at least we'll be in Cleveland and a lot closer to home. It's now morning on the east coast so even if we miss this flight we should be able to get another flight very quickly. Luckily we don't have to worry about that because the flight gets in a bit early and after walking to our next terminal there's even time left to get a quick bite at Subway. The last flight also goes off without a hitch and to our surprise we find that all of our bags have made the trip as well.

I strongly hope to never have to go through anything like this again, but maybe sharing our experience will help someone else in knowing what to do when the unexpected happens ...