Featured Maps: Honeymoon Trip, 10 Years Later (3 July 2010)

I'm going to steal the featured map today to wish my lovely wife a happy 10th anniversary.

Ok, it wouldn't be the featured map without a map and today's depicts our honeymoon trip. We planned to go to Kona, then on to Vatulele, and finally to Cairns. At the last minute, the political problems caused the U.S. Department of State to advise against going to Fiji, so we extended our stays in Kona and Australia and wedged in a few nights near Kahului, Maui.

Careful readers may wonder why we flew to Kona via Maui instead of taking a non-stop flight. We got engaged aboard a United Airlines Boeing 777 and thought it appropriate to start our honeymoon on another one; we connected to Aloha Airlines for the short Maui to Kona flight.

In addition to island-hopping in Hawaii, once in Australia we took a day trip to Lizard Island. Our most scenic flight in Australia, however, was the CNS-SYD segment of our journey home. Like our OGG-KOA flight, this one was aboard a 737 of a airline that no longer exists, Ansett Australia in this case. What made it especially scenic was spending the last hour of the flight in the cockpit, including our approach over Sydney Harbour and landing at Sydney's Kingsford Smith Airport!

Click on the map to see how I used markers with labels for stops along our journey (or planned stops in the case of Fiji) while simple connections in Honolulu and Sydney are unlabeled to simplify the map.