As requested, we showed up with our bags and everything ready to go well over an hour before our scheduled flight time. Tired of cooking in the kitchen and doing dishes, we elected to tap into our stash of pre-packaged snacks. Sorry, rats. Better luck with our scraps next time.
A gathering of people had materialized out of nowhere at the tiny airport terminal on Ofu. None were actually getting on the plane. I suppose the only twice per week flight is exciting enough to garner a small crowd. There actually wasn’t any check-in procedure at all. At one point a man simply yelled out, “Brian?” to which I gave a head nod. Check-in complete. Only six people were on our flight — five of them had also been on the flight out to Ofu a few days ago. We left about thirty minutes early, which gave me an out-of-the-box idea and a different scenario for getting home…
The Hawaiian flight from Pago Pago to Honolulu wouldn’t leave until after 11pm. I didn’t have a lot of faith in my rental car request being granted given that my own research had turned up no availability from any vendor on the island. It therefore seemed likely that we would end up back at the Tradewinds Hotel . . .for the whole effing day. There’s nothing nearby, the lobby is always jammed with bodies, and at any given moment there is a family reunion taking place or a child learning to play the recorder. BUT, since we arrived early, we had a few minutes before the next flight took off for Apia on Samoa. We approached the Talofa Airways office to see if they had any more tickets available. There were exactly two on the flight that was leaving in 45 minutes. The ladies working the desk encouraged us to take Fiji over Hawaiian because they said people will list only themselves for the Hawaiian flight and then show up with 12 of their family members. If we didn’t get on the Hawaiian Airlines flight, we’d be stuck at Pago Pago for another four days. At the Tradewinds. With recorders. Unless…
Like the celebrity couple that we are, Nicole threw down some cash to secure the last two seats on Talofa Airways bound for Apia. They immediately checked our bags and we were off to the boarding area, which in Pago Pago resembles a Greyhound bus terminal. Flown by the same pilot as we had on Talofa a few days prior, we launched on over to Samoa for our second flight of the day and it wasn’t yet 11am, though as you know, we arrived in Samoa tomorrow — a fact that proved confusing when listing for flights. We took a short shuttle over to the main terminal of Faleolo airport and checked in for Fiji Airways, immediately given seats together in their economy plus section.
Faleolo’s terminal is quite small (but still much more put together than Pago Pago). They do not get a lot of traffic, but with an Air New Zealand flight departing not long before ours, the terminal was fairly crowded. Our 737 Max began boarding almost an hour early and departed thirty minutes ahead of schedule. This would make it feasible to catch a connection in HNL back to LAX as long as Honolulu doesn’t give us the same kind of crap that they did when we were heading to Pago Pago.
We landed 30 minutes early, and went through Global Entry before waiting a spell for our bags. We received messages on our phones that United had begun boarding. Quick aside: Perhaps I’m the only one, but United’s messaging gives me anxiety. Like, I don’t need a “See you soon!” message four hours before my flight. It will only make me unnecessarily anxious. Everyone knows, 15 minutes before your flight is how Bricole roll up. Anyway . . .we finally got our bags and HNL’s security was uncharacteristically efficient at this hour. We arrived at gate G3 before any of the standbys had been cleared. The flight was supposed to leave within the next 20 minutes, but HNL does seem to be consistently horrible at clearing standbys. Island time strikes again.
Finally we were given seats apart in middle sections of a packed plane. And thus our flights ended as they began — in incredibly uncomfortable seats on a packed United 777. We were on our way to LAX before we would have battled the gathering throngs of people at Pago Pago’s primitive airport terminal. Between that and the Tradewinds, I think it was good to make forward progress — even if that meant going a day forward in time only to go a day back and end up on a redeye arriving the same day we had just observed in Samoa. Follow all that? Me neither. Reflections to follow.
passports & pepto bismol 