Sadly, even the bestest vacation has to end sometime, so on Saturday we had to check out by 12 noon, take the car and hang out the whole day, as the planes to the mainland leave in the evening, because they are going east. So as going to europe, you fly over night, and arrive early morning.
First we wanted to finally do our trip to the vulcano up the mountain or at least drive around the island some more.. but I still didn’t feel well enough, and neither did Tania, so we decided to just go to Lahaina again and hang out for a while until our dinner reservation at 1700h kicks in. The nice persuasive lady again had persuaded us to go to the “Big Mamma’s Fishouse” near the airport which is supposed to be almost worth the trip alone.
To Lahaina we went, walked around the little park downtown, which we hadn’t been to before and discovered that they were having a little community art sale event of the 
Lahaina art society under the big tree in the park. It was basically couple little nice thingies that we already knew from the hotel, like some porcellain plates, little paintings and - of course - a lot of people with nice pictures.. which seems to be the art-du-jour. Most of them were actually really nice, one has to admit.
So we bought two Xmas presents - but Psst!! I won’t uncover more here.. - looked interested at printed-on-canvas pictures of conspiciously naked women with rays in the sea and generally had a good time. There was even your of-the-shelf spiritual didgeridoo, mandalai or-whatever-weird-instrument-they-play-these-days strange guy playing one of the aforementioned devices to etherical singing and music. Pretty cool!
Tania slept a little on my lap and I lazily eyed a guy on the next bench selling little glass pearls or the like to people coming by from his little box - until one of the ladies with the tables full of higher-class artwork came and informed him that he needed a certificate to be allowed to sell art in this park and obviously he didnt have one. Because only the Lahaina art society has one, to which she sharply deduced he didn’t belong, so she suggested that he’d better get lost now, or somebody will call somebody who has more physical jurisdiction over the place than her. He looked kinda hurt but nonetheless started packing up, allthewhile the lady lingered around and again offered the advice that he had better get lost _right now_, or else. So he packed up and another - more friendly - lady came by, telling him about the society and how he could join and stuff.. being more trained in the diplomatic arts, it seemed.
We had a lil sandwich thingy and shake in a small local burger place right there next to the park and hung out at the place a lil’ more… went to the beach to watch the surfers and slowly went back to the car to drive to the main town. It takes about 45mins and is a really nice drive on the shore. We were there a lil early so decided to drive around a lil, but the town wasn’t at all that interesting, no real downtown to see, just a big mall that we ended up turning around at.
We remembered the persuasive lady saying that the restaurant (big mama’s fish house) is near the airport, so we drove around the neighborhood a little bit, but couldn’t find it.. so I went into a surfshop to ask, and turns out it is like 20 min away. We drove in that direction a while, but then decided to turn around since we weren’t really hungry anyway, and return to the mall. So we did. Walked around there, had some really good sushi in a very japanese sushi bar 
- obviously the asian influence is big there… and then returned to the airport.
We turned in the car - no problem there - then went to the main terminal to stand in line, which was the wrong at first, since we didnt know which airline we were taking, so we went to the right line - after getting thru the agricultural screening for the US mainland first - Tania got stopped for trying to go under the little barrier bands, because you obviously dont do that, got checked for the right tickets, the agricult. screening and her passport and everything else like 5x by like really un-nice ladies, and finally we made it into the main security zone. I had a starbucks and we waited for the flight.
Once in LAX - 6h later - we had to make it to the gate pretty fast, and took the next plane to Denver. In Denver we discovered that our flight to ELP had been canceled and it turned out that it had been snowing in ELP a couple centimeters, following which the whole city panics and shuts down every airport, major highway, outlet and company. Anyway, there where two more flights for ELP scheduled that day, which were overbooked already of course, and had a really long waiting list. The impatient german couple right next to us decided to get mad and scream at the help desk attendend - which of course wasnt helping them at all - and we took the motel overnight and a couple meal vouchers.
We waited for our bags to come out for like an hour, Tania wrote some mails to her profs that she cant make it to class and off we went to find the shuttle. There it was, with some more people already waiting, and it took us to the hotel. Everything was paid we went up to the room to sleep. It was pretty cold in Denver - around 0/C - and of course we hadnt brought any warm clothes.
Later that day after we woke up, we decided to take the little shuttle to go to the mall (Northfield Stapleton) right around the corner to buy some to eat for later, and go to the movies to see hitman. It was going to start about 40 mins from when we arrived, so we got some little thing to eat, Tania got Subway and I went to a Mexican Grill place to get some really good chicken quesadillas, we ate and went to the movie…
It wasn’t at all that good… oh well.. so after we had some more time till the shuttle arrived, so we strolled over to target - which had all kinds of groceries BTW, like fresh fruits - bought some munchies for later to eat in front of the TV and went back to wait in front of the cinema. The other two women who went to the movies with us to see Beowolf were there too, waiting.. turned out they were flight attendants, obviously since Denver is a hub for United they all have layovers there, or just wait around for their next flight… Captains and other airline personal, too.. and they all stay in these hotels.. and obviously thats the reason for the shuttles…
We watched a lil TV but got tired really fast.. and just went to sleep. Woke up early, had some breakfast of our vouchers again… and back to the airport it was. There we used the vouchers again to get some lunch - Tania at McDonalds and me to get a coffee again at Caribou - and we waited for the flight again.
Just our luck - it was delayed again because of technical problems, and the captain decided to switch planes, so we had to go to another gate, board the plane and get off the ground like 1 hour late.. Finally 1,5h later we were in ELP, Cecy picked us up.. and it was actually pretty cold still…
Thanks to the bad weather, sleepless nighs and lots of stress my minor ear infection of the previous days turned to a major one… and I had to start to take antibiotics.. and got all scared that I was going to have another nightmare like one year ago. But thankfully it didn’t.
