Oahu, Hawaii day 11

. . . and just like that our stay in paradise is almost over!  The weather today was not so great . . .

. . . we fly back to Texas at 5:00 tonight so guess the timing was good with the weather.  We have had amazing weather the entire trip so really can not complain!  We walked a few blocks to the Hawaii  Army Museum at Fort Derussy.  Colin enjoyed seeing all the exhibits . . .

. . . even though he looks less than thrilled!  I on the other hand started receiving texts that our flight was delayed until 7pm, then 8pm, and at that point stopped looking, but oh I was stressed.  A big winter storm on the mainland USA was preventing our plane from leaving Chicago to pick us up in Hawaii so we would be super delayed.  What can you do?  So we returned to the hotel, left our bags at the bellhop desk and headed to the beach to relax and enjoy some more sunshine!

I tried to keep the rental car a few extra hours but the price was insane plus the weather was awful and raining so not much fun being out and about anyway.  As we were returning to collect our bags, I noticed a lot of people standing around looking at something . . . I discovered there were penguins on the hotel property!

Sad I know, but they seemed happy.  We collected our bags and dropped our rental car off at 3:30 as planned.  Funny thing is as we left the entrance door said something about their fleet is 100% smoke free . . . ummmm NO apparently not because we got one that had obviously been smoked in!  We arrived to check in for our flight and learned we would now leave at 11:00pm . . . indeed we would spend almost 8 hours waiting.  Our flight was delayed again so they ended up putting us on a plane that arrived earlier from California.  We were so happy to be headed back to DFW, but as we boarded and got settled the captain announced there were mechanical issues with one of the fuel pumps so we would wait for almost 2 more hours.  Thankfully, we were allowed to stay on the plane.  I don't remember much else because Colin and I were both asleep before take off and woke just before we landed.  Now that was awesome!  It was a super long day but so excited to be home after an awesome trip!  And Colin was happy to discover Santa stopped by our house even though he was gone.