Hawaii Trip

With a massive hat tip to Blunoz, who provided lots of guidance on what to do in Hawaii, let me bring everyone up to date on my wife and I's recent vacation to Hawaii. Since we only had really 4 full days and 2 half days, we stayed on Oahu, especially since she had never been there before.

Since we were using Skymiles for this trip, that kind of defined when we could come and go, so, we left Atlanta on a Friday morning, connected via Newark on Continental, and arrived Friday evening around 6pm. I have to give Continental credit, both flights were on-time and the personal DVD players on their 767 to HNL was much appreciated on the 11hr flight.

We wanted to stay at the Hale-Koa, but since it was a last-minute planned event, we settled for one of their partner hotels, the Aqua Palms and Spa, just a block away, across from the Hilton Hawaiian Village. The Aqua Palms and Spa is very highly rated on TripAdvisor, and I recommend it. They have great rates for military, rooms are plenty big, and the staff is friendly. It's not a resort, ok?

So, since we arrived at our hotel around 7pm, we unpacked, listened to the fireworks show at the Hilton (blocked from our view by the new tower going up at the Hilton), then meandered to the Hale-Koa for a late dinner.

Read more after the jump...

On Saturday, we were up early and decided to hike up Diamond Head. It's touristy, but, you must do this when you go to Hawaii, and get the postcard shot (as seen in this post). Go early.

The rest of Saturday was spent at the Hale-Koa pool, then dinner again there (there was quite a bit of drinking by the pool that day). We headed off for an early bedtime thinking we might try to make the sunrise over at Makaapu'u Point the next morning. Well, we actually did get up about 5am for the 5:45 sunrise, and would have made it early,but I got lost, so we were about 5-10 minutes late, arriving at the overlook before the blowhole overlook.

Unfortunately, this was where we experienced the one rotten event of our vacation. As we played on the rocks at this overlook, some jerk(s), seeing that we had left my wife's purse and our beach towels in the car, decided to break into it and take the $5 cash, the $15 worth of towels a few credit cards (those I didn't have), and her ID's. They really didn't get anything of much value, but, having your stuff stolen by a-holes is just a downer. Needless to say, after filing a report with the Honolulu PD, that day was shot!

More to come later!