This is not easy.

One of the big drawbacks of living in what is so quaintly referred to as a “flyover state” is that it can be really difficult to get from here to anywhere else. We looked at multiple possible itineraries and airports (Dayton, Cincinnati, and Columbus) when trying to find flights, and everything kind of sucked. We ended up just using the Dayton airport on the rationale that since all of our options sucked, we might as well just use the closest and most convenient airport.

There were no direct flights. None. There weren’t even any flights with only one layover. We ended up flying from Dayton to Chicago, Chicago to Kahului (Maui), Kahului to Kona. (Our trip back took us from Kona to Honolulu, Honolulu to Denver, Denver to Dayton.)

Because none of our flights offered anything beyond the slightly frightening “boxed lunches for sale” option, we picnicked our way to Hawaii. I packed home-made sausage rolls, dark chocolate almonds, oranges, and a couple of bags of baby-bel mini-cheeses. We ate better then most of the rest of the people on our flights.

One of our flights (the Chicago to Kahului one) ended up being delayed for well over an hour (we sat on the plane, at the gate, for the entire time) because they had mistakenly boarded more people than they actually had available seats. Don’t ask me how that happened… shouldn’t they have been able to count and compare the numbers of passengers with the number of available seats and see that one number didn’t match the other? Argh. Anyway, it took them over an hour to kick someone off of the flight so that we could finally take off.

By the magic of a 6-hour time difference we landed in Kona around 4pm local time. We were not on local time. We were slightly beyond exhausted.

We found our luggage, picked up our rental car, and navigated through the strange and blasted lavascape that we had landed in to Kona, found our condo, checked in, and asked the manager to recommend a place for dinner.

Note: Driving through a blasted lavascape on paradise while listening to “Car Talk” on NPR in your rental car makes for a more than slightly surreal experience, especially if you are jet-lagged. Since we tend to listen to “Car Talk” on Saturday mornings while running errands, this only made everything seem even more off-kilter.

Anyway. The condo manager (shout-out here to Kona Reef condos, which was a perfectly lovely place to stay while in Kona) recommended that we walk down the coast a little and do Happy Hour at Don the Beachcomber’s.

I was feeling rather grim by this time and really needed a beer. Happy Hour sounded pretty good.

We walked right by Don the Beachcomber’s (because we didn’t realize that it was actually located at the Royal Kona Resort) and wound up at Huggo’ instead.

I highly recommend Huggo’s. This place was great. We walked in with no reservations at what must have been close to the dinner rush hour and, by way of simply asking for it, ended up at a table on the patio overlooking the ocean and the beautiful Hawaiian sunset.

We got those beers we wanted. I just wish that we could find Kona Brewing Company beer in Ohio, because they do very good beer.

The food was fabulous too. This was the fanciest place that we ate at on the whole trip. Looking back on it it is kind of a pity that we hit this place while we were so jet-lagged and tired. It would have been nice to have eaten here later in the trip (or to have come back a second time) so that we could properly appreciate the wonderful food.