The madness that is air travel

I am thankful on a regular basis for my mom , but I am even more thankful when I need to make travel arrangements. My mom is a travel agent, has been for longer than I've been around, and her expertise has saved me lots of headaches and lots of money. We bought our tickets last month, about 6 months prior to our departure, which seems to be pretty good timing, as flights were starting to fill up.

Because of the cats and air travel regulations for animals, we cannot take a direct flight to Honolulu. So we thought we would fly from Detroit to Los Angles, then LA to Honolulu. Well, that sounds like a reasonable plan, but with the crazy air fares it would cost us $600 more to leave from Detroit than from Chicago, so we're leaving from Chicago. I just hope the weather cooperates!

We have two big stresses right now - finding someplace to stay which will accept the cats once we get to Honolulu (harder than you might think), and finding someplace to live. At the moment we are trying to pick a side of the island to focus our searches. We've had advice from a couple locals that the leeward side is a fine place to live, but that the commute is just awful (worse than awful, actually), so we are thinking that we should perhaps focus on the windward side, or perhaps something closer to Honolulu. The disadvantage to the windward side is that rent prices are even higher for less space. Any comments you might have heard about the outrageous price of renting/home-ownership in Hawaii have not been exaggerated - they really are outrageous, and for properties which often aren't all that nice or spiffy, which is what is even more frustrating. I have been finding places for $1900 a month that I wouldn't pay $300 a month for out here. Sticker-shock, indeed.