March 8th, 2011: Off to Tropical Palau

We left for Palau this morning on the 6:00 AM flight, which means we woke up at 3:30 to get ready and make it to the airport in time.  Mark and I both had 3 bags to check in and I was going to carry some metal pieces on.  Some of the baggage weights were off so I had to rearrange my bags a little bit and TSA said that I couldn’t bring the metal pieces onboard because they were too sharp.  I can understand, but that meant we had to check another bag in.  So after 20 minutes at the ticket counter we had everything ready and finally got our tickets.  I felt bad for the guy that was helping us, but he was very polite for 5:00 in the morning and having to deal with us.  We made our connecting flight in Los Angeles and flew to Hawaii.  Mark and I were lucky enough to be upgraded to first class.  I wish that happened every time.

We met up with the rest of the people we were working with and talked about what had been going on since we saw them last a year ago.  There are 4 people from Scripps in San Diego, 3 people from University of Hawaii and Mark and I.   After a couple hour layover we got on our flight and prepared for the 8 hour flight.  Apparently it was going to be a little longer today, because when we got to the runway, we found out that the military had closed the runway we were going to use and the other one was too short for the plane to take off on so we had to go back to the terminal and remove some cargo and passengers.  This meant that we were probably not going to make our connection in Guam and some of our luggage might not make it either. 

An hour later we finally took off for Guam.  The flight was good and we found out when we landed that our plane was waiting for us and we wouldn’t have to spend the night in Guam.  Another fun fact is that we crossed the dateline, which means that we flew into tomorrow (the future).    

After another 2 hour flight we landed in Palau and went through customs and grabbed all of our baggage.  Pat and Lori from the Coral Reef Research Foundation picked us up and took us to our apartment for the next couple of weeks. 

After a long day we could finally get some rest.  

Ian