Tsunami Warnings, Pineapples & Our Flight Home

The last post we posted was of our last full day in Kauai. However, we've yet to report on the day we left, which definitely merits a few words.
We were woken up at 5:45am by someone affiliated with Kauai Vacation rentals, telling us that we had to vacate the beach house within 15 minutes. We were in a complete frenzy. We hadn't packed anything yet, so we were literally just grabbing everything we could as fast as we could, emptying dresser drawers, closets, and clearing nightstands, dresser-tops, and counters. It probably goes without saying that we didn't get time for a shower, in fact, we didn't even get time to brush our teeth.
Having been told that we had 15 minutes to vacate, we thought that the tsunami was coming in 15 minutes. The kitchen counter was still stocked with tropical fruit and my hands were full but I was capable of grabbing one last thing so I grabbed - what else? - a pineapple. I'm still a little puzzled by it, but what can I say for myself except that we all have our little quirks and idiosyncracies. Whenever someone asks you, "if your house was burning down, or about to flood, or whatever, and you only had time to grab one thing, what would it be?" Apparently, for me, it would be a pineapple!
But of course this was not an issue of life or death really. We had all packed all of our things, and all of my loved ones and I were walking out of the house together. We weren't having to save our house or all of the things that would be in our house if it were the house we lived in. Still a funny story though.
So after successfully exiting the beach house by 6 am we drove to Princeville, and then to Kilauea, to figure out our plans. There is a great little cafe in Kilauea that proved to be the perfect place to get some coffee and breakfast, get the latest news on the tsunami warnings, and use wi-fi to check on tsunami status, flights, etc. Most importantly of all, Kilauea is on high ground, so it was a safe spot, or as safe a as you could find in Kauai, had a tsunami made its way there.
We were supposed to fly out at 11:30 am and the tsunami was expected to hit at 11 am, which put us in a difficult quandary: stay safe on high ground and avoid catching our flight since we'd have to drive straight through the tsunami hazard zone to get there, or try to catch our flight, and also take our chances getting caught in the tsunami danger zone en route to the airport. Complicating matters further was the fact that we could not reach Hawaiian Airlines to get our flight's status, and we couldn't get any info online either.
We heard that the Hilo airport had closed, and then someone told us that the Honolulu airport had closed too, but as it turned out the Honolulu airport hadn't closed at all. Rob's brother German was finally able to reach Hawaiian Airlines for us and confirm that our flights were still on time. So we went for it, and they were literally blocking the roads off behind us. We got to the Lihue airport at about five minutes until 9 am and the roads closed at 9 am. Once we arrived at the airport, the lines were a mile long, because not only were the people who had flights to catch in line, but people were also swarming the airport trying to get off of the island. It was a scene. Although we'd gotten there two and a half hours early, we got through the line just in time to catch our flight to Honolulu. And miraculously, even though the tsunami was expected to hit half an hour before our flight, the island was not awash in waves when our plane took off. It was a good thing, because we had another hour and a half layover at the Honolulu airport before our big flight home to Sacramento. In the end, the tsunami appeared to have spared the Hawaiian Islands for the most part. Good thing, because other wise we might not be here to tell about it. Being there, and hearing the reports, you might have thought Armageddon was coming, so in the end I guess we were all lucky. I guess that about tells the story of our island adventure but stay tuned for various miscellaneous photos that didn't fit in with any of our blog posts and possibly a few more stories. Aloha!