I really liked flying this way, first to Hawaii then Taipei. It allowed me to adjust my mindset to “vacation” mode as I slowly unwound myself in Hawaii. With my bad back, it was also nice to break up the flights into 5 hour, 8 hour, 5 hour flights, as we stopped over in Japan.
My least favorite thing about flying is the kids sleep. I tend to over stress about sleep and get very overwhelmed when they get into that crazy lack of sleep state. Thankfully this time around the children are older!
Itinerary: Flying to Taiwan
We kind of skipped quite a few hours between the 8th and 9th due to time change. The China Air flight itself was great. The plane was less then 1/3 full. I wonder if it’s always like this from Oahu. Makes me want to do it again despite the overall long traveling time. We had two 4-seat rows to ourselves and sat near the front of the cabin. . If only this was a night flight so the kids could take advantage of the lovely seats to sleep! As it was it took awhile to get Astroboy down and Thumper refused to nap (though she needed it).
The only bad thing was that the armrest didn’t come all the way up. They watched A LOT of TV, including ChiaoHu, Up, and Charlotte’s Web. There wasn’t that many really age appropriate shows for their age on the flight.
The kids took a short nap and then we had a 1 hour stopover in Japan, where we took a LONG walk out to the front of the terminal to get security checked and then walked the whole LONG way back to get on the plane. We admired the bathroom where Thumper wanted to know why the toilet sings and I lingered in the snack shop as it was 9pm Hawaiian time by then and I was very hungry. Unfortunately, I only had 10 yen on me. 🙁
The flight to Taiwan was not as nice though we still managed to have three empty rows of seats that we sprawled on. Astroboy refused to sleep though and he progressively got louder and louder. He would not lay down to sleep and could not manage to find a comfortable position in his tiny seat with 4 pillows around him. He kept fussing over his pillows. Finally he was down and I went down as well and next thing I know we were descending.
It took us a long time to get out because H did not want to wake up. I ended up having to carry him, with a carseat and Thumper helped w/ all the other luggage. I’m not even quite sure how I managed all that. By the time we went to baggage claim, ours was already off by the side.
My 4th aunt and uncle came to pick us up. Thumper had wanted to see them when we landed but she turned all shy when she actually saw them. However, after we got into their car, she went on and on about wanting to eat bitter melon (guess what we’re going to eat today). Astroboy on the other hand, was cranky because he wanted to sleep and only warmed up when we checked in. He’d been a koala bear on me all night but scampered down as soon as he heard the word, lollipop. He was even willing to let my uncle pick him up.
We did not get to Ark Hotel till 12am probably. And the kids didn’t settle down w/o a few threats, probably 1/1:30? I shall sing praises about the hotel tomorrow.
If I had anything to comment about the flight itself it would be to bring more snacks and I should have skipped the carseat. I thought we needed the carseat, but cranky traveling kids don’t want to be strapped down. I ended up not using it at all. Partly we were really really lucky and had all those empty rows to ourselves. Maybe the carseat will come in handy on our return flight.
