Our Australian Adventure

About a year ago, our friends Bill & Peggy asked us if we wanted to go to Australia with them and two other friends of theirs. Sure! we replied!
For a long time, it was going to come and we did lots of planning - but now its here! We're off on a new adventure!
The "phases" are as follows:
1) Fly to Honolulu for a long weekend;
2) Catch Carnival Cruise Line MS Spirit as she is repositioned from Alaskan cruising to Australian cruising (with port calls in French Polynesia & Fiji);
3) After 16 days, Spirit docks in Sydney and we immediately fly to Cairns in Far North (equatorial) Queensland;
4) After 3 nights, we fly back to Sydney for 6 days;
5) Board Holland America Lines MS Oostersdam for a 14 day cruise to Tasmania and New Zealand;
6) Nov 6 Fly from Sydney to Oahu for a week on the beach at Bellows AFB rec area (on the "windward" shore just down the beach from Kaneoe Bay);
7) Nov 15, head home!

My first post will be on the trip out from Indy to Honolulu.
Our son Dave drove us to O'Hare and we checked in at American Airlines. The gal who checked us in was great and gave us fabulous seats!

Cute kids!

During the flight to LA, we had fantastic weather and a great view.

The weather cleared as we went west, especially as we crossed into Colorado - at least I think that's where this is!

If anyone knows for sure where this is other than maybe Colorado, please let me know!

Pretty sure this is Monument Valley, Utah

A pretty lake in the distance - maybe Lake Powell?

Love the way the clouds shadows on the earth look like pools!

The Colorado River at the base of the Grand Canyon

Pretty sure this is Lake Mead - couldn't see Hoover Dam or Las Vegas from our angle

And just that quick, we are in the LA basin with some hi roller resort & golf course - maybe the Pacific Palms resort?

The immense size of LA has to be seen to be believed!

 We flew to Los Angeles and grabbed a bite to eat at Starbuck's, boarded our plane for Honolulu and were dismayed when the pilot announced he was "downing" the plane for a faulty pitot tube. This is the device that measures air speed and is pretty critical (there was an Air France flight that went down when the pitot tube fed wrong information to the flight computer), so we were delayed while they brought out a new plane. The pilot reassured us this was not related to anything we'd read in the paper (pilot slowdown and being super picky on downing airplanes) but was a real safety issue. We left LAX about 4 hours late, but we did leave!
 

And, at last, we are in Hawaii!

 We called the hotel and they picked us up and we were in our room by 10PM Honolulu time = 4AM Indy time!

Tomorrow: Pearl Harbor!