T minus 7

This is the log entry I meant to write yesterday but I fell asleep early and missed the time-stamp deadline for yesterday's date. I guess I wore myself out running around whittling down my to-do list. It was a productive day. I was determined to get the ticketing of the inter-island flights in Hawaii done one way or another. I called my travel agent to see if she had access to ticketing arrangements I didn't have. She got  back to me a bit later to say that anything she could do would be far more costly than what I might do myself if someone in the States was willing to pay for the tickets and then have me reimburse them. With timezone differences to wait for, I couldn't call anyone in the States for several hours, so I turned my attention to hunting down all the documents needed for bureaucracy's sake. I now have them all, but it was an exhausting task and took a lot of forbearance (perhaps more than I possessed). At one of the offices the clerk chatted with me a bit about her recent trip to Hawaii. She said she had no problem booking inter-island tickets from here over the Internet. She encouraged me to try a different tact and sure enough, when I got home, it worked! I now have the flights, the car rentals and the lodging all arranged for the Hawaiian-experience segment of this trip. Both inter-island flights are non-refundable and the hotel in Honolulu is non-refundable. I can only hope that nothing delays us from getting there and getting around according to schedule. I just read that Qantas Airlines has stopped flying out of Melbourne because of a volcano in Chile. No way to know what scheduling surprises await us and how they will affect us. That's what makes a trip such as this an adventure. (We aren't flying via Melbourne -- Perth, Alice Springs and Sydney, yes, but not Melbourne.)

The to-do list is getting shorter, and more manageable, but it's still going to be a challenge to tick off everything on it by the time we leave. Packing is still one of the major challenges, continuing to tidy up for our house watchers is another and correspondence, which is WAY behind schedule, is yet another. Apologies to all who haven't received follow up mail. I'll probably write you all in a big burst of writing soon. It's all part of the to-do stuff I'm trying to do.