Notes from the Road: Planes, Planes, and Beach (Premium)

I travel a lot for work. Rarely do I get to go to a place as wonderful—and far away—as Hawaii.

I don’t normally write too much about my work travel experiences these days: It’s something I did as a younger guy, and I view it now more as an admission of ignorance than anything else. But after decades of travel for both work and play, this one does stand out. This is a special destination. And, let’s face it. When it comes to Hawaii, I am absolutely ignorant.

And I’m not going to see too much of it. We’re here in Maui for the Snapdragon Tech Summit, and Qualcomm has booked two and a half very busy days for both Brad and I. But it’s Hawaii. And I will just assume that I’ll come back and see more later. Just being here makes that more likely. Words simply don’t suffice.

Getting here, of course, was not ideal.

I fly to Europe a lot, but those trips are typically 6 to 8 hours in the air, depending, and they’re often overnight trips on the way there. This trip was scheduled for about 12 hours in the air, during the day, though it came in a bit under that thanks to favorable winds. I’ve only been on two trips of that comparable length: New Zealand in 2012 and Israel in 2000. (Both were also work trips.)

But it really took over 20 hours.

How do you turn 12 hours of air travel into over 20 hours of actual travel? By flying out of JFK in New York, which is 2.5 hours from my house when there’s no traffic. And there is never no traffic. In the process of booking my travel, we ran out of options closer to home, so I told Qualcomm, which paid for the flights and hotel, that any New York-area airport would be fine. Probably should have done some homework on the distance to JFK.

Adding to my misery, my first flight was Monday morning at 10 am. In order to get there two hours early—my minimum for a domestic flight—and accounting for rush hour traffic, I would need to leave at 4:30 or 5 am on the morning of a day in which I’d be traveling in planes for 12 hours.

Fortunately, a reader recommended an option which I took: You can book a hotel right outside of JFK the night before a flight for about $300, and it includes 7 days of free parking. That’s actually a bargain, so I spent Sunday night at the Radisson JFK. It wasn’t horrible, and it was far more relaxing than racing out into the dark and driving from Pennsylvania to JFK the next morning. I still didn’t sleep well. I never do the night before a morning flight.

I pack light. All carry-on, all the time. I considered bringing a few different laptops with me since I’m in the middle of reviewing several devices. But ultimately, I let Surface Book 2 skip to the front of the line because of its excellent battery life. So I had the Surface Book 2, the Surface Precision Mouse, my iPad Pro, and associated cables, plus my Bose noise-canceling headphones in my smaller bag, and then my clothes, toiletry bag, and gadget bag in my carry-on luggage. I brought the OnePlus 5T as a backup. My Pixel 2 XL is my normal phone.

I also flew Hawaiian Air for the first time. This was an overwhelmingly positive experience. I was able to upgrade my seat for the big flight out, from JFK to Honolulu, to a seat with more space, and it turned out to be an excellent bulkhead/exit row seat with only on person next to me and tons of space. The people were fantastic, from the person who checked me to the steward who sat across from me during takeoff and landing. Very enjoyable.

But it was almost 11 hours in the air. 10:45, I guess. A long time.

I tried to write, but couldn’t get much done. I watched movies. Napped. Listened to audiobooks. Caught up on some podcasts. Napped. Ate. Got up and wandered around. Time passed. Slowly.

But it wasn’t as horrible as it could have been. I’ve sort of come to understand that the seat really makes or breaks a flight. Back in May when Brad I flew to Amsterdam, we upgraded to seats with more space for about $100 a seat. It was the best $100 I ever spent: We had plenty of room, and it made the flight bearable. Ditto for the flight to Honolulu.

Of course, I wasn’t going to Honolulu. I was going to Maui. Which is a different island. So I had a second flight, scheduled for 40 minutes, but really about 24 minutes in the air, tops, to Maui. And a 2.5 hour layover. But since Hawaiian Air has multiple flights to Maui every day, I paid $30 to get on an earlier flight. And didn’t have too much downtime in Honolulu at all.

Complicating matters, my wife came to Hawaii too, but on a different airline. (Qualcomm curiously did not pay for her trip.) So I waited for her to arrive in a bar in the airport next to her gate. That worked out fine.

The final stage in this journey was the surprisingly long cab ride of 30 minutes to the hotel. Qualcomm said there would be signs and people there helping us get on a free shuttle, but neither were there, and we ended up paying $65 for a cab ride. By the time we arrived at the hotel, it was 8 pm.

So the total travel time, door to door, was about 20.5 hours if you include the time it took me to get to JFK. Which of course I do.

I’m not complaining. We arrived in a literal paradise. After a quick snack at the bar—my wife hadn’t really eaten all day—we tossed our bags in the room, threw on our bathing suits, and swam in the Pacific Ocean in the dark. We had the whole beach to ourselves.

Are you kidding me? Totally worth it.