Aloha!
Well, we made it. We survived our longest family trip both in miles traveled and consecutive days spent away from home. We left bright and early on a Saturday morning(our actual anniversary, Oct 15) walked through security, loaded on to the plane and flew about 5.5 hours with no issues. Landed in Oahu, grabbed our luggage which for some reason is like a miles walk away, jumped on a shuttle and picked up our rental car. Rental car should be a term used to describe any car of which is potentially the worst car available. It was some sort of 4 door Scion thing which I have to admit after a week of driving it, I was was definitely ready to give it back at the end. It's best attribute was the it had air conditioning that was so cold you couldn't keep higher than fan speed 2.
Off to our Hotel which was not your typical hotel room. We intentionally stayed at what they might call a "mini-suite" mostly because it had a full kitchen in the room. This worked out perfect for us because we hit a Safeway and bought a weeks worth of stuff to make breakfast every day and lunches to take with us with the only remaining difficulty being dinners. The time change smacked us in the face on both ends but the best part about it while we were there was going to bed "early" and still waking up and being out and about relatively early the next morning. It definitely screwed us on the way home, though. Our flight home was delayed basically 3 hours so that combined with us losing 3 hours we didn't get home until what the clock said was 130am. Thank you Scott & Glenda for the late night airport service. =)
Heather did a fantastic job of researching places to go and see on a daily basis. I'll admit I had nothing to do with planning where we went, but I did drive everywhere in our terrible rental car so you know, bonus points. Heather found a bunch of great beaches and Chloe just wanted to be in the ocean literally every chance she could get. We spent a few days on the beach swimming and snorkeling and whatnot. We drove out to Kualoa Ranch where we had lunch and then did a movie tour which is basically a gigantic private ranch property that is used for filming a lot of movies(apparently). They load you up in a giant school bus with no windows and a tour guide drives around this huge place showing you stuff and talking about movies. One day we went to a Sea Life Park which was probably the highlight of the trip for Chloe. At this park, they had some typical water life but the main attraction was the ability to swim, touch, and interact with a dolphin. Heather and Chloe did the water experience, I decided to not and unfortunately it was quite difficult to take photos but I did get a good video of the whole thing. Then of course the sucker you in the end into buying a $20 photo that their photographers took so at least we have that. Then after that, in the same park, they had a really neat bird sanctuary thing where you could enter and check out the birds up close and personal. If you picked up a little feed stick and held it out, the birds would fly over and land on your hand! We had a few incidents of Chloe getting startled but then it was all good. Weird, but really neat.
Over the course of the week I drove around 300 miles and we drove almost every possibly route around the Island. Towards the end of the week we drove quite a long way to go visit the Disney Aulani resort which we originally were considering. It's beautiful and amazing as you might imagine it would be, but we agreed that our version of the trip was more suited to us. Staying there would be amazing if that was your plan, to stay there! Beautiful pools, water slides, private beach cove and I'm sure great food and shows and whatever else..but I am much happier jumping in the car and adventuring out. Fun to see it, though.
The weather was beautiful, essentially the same every day in the mid 80s and not once did it drop below 75(even overnight). We did have a little bit of rain here and there, but nothing that ever effected anything we were doing. Overall, a great trip that was somewhat thrown together in the 11th hour. Heather put in a lot of time, stress and effort trying to have a great trip and hopefully she feels like it all paid off in the end. LOL. I'm bad at vacations and bad at relaxing for the most part so I tend to try to just go with the flow. The only bad part of the trip like I mentioned before was being stuck on the airplane for literally 3.5 hours on the way home. Other than that, smooth sailing.
Obviously over the course of a week I took a ton of photos, so here is a random pull from the week. Have a great weekend, folks~
Mahalo!
-B
