Hawaii
November 5-28, 2011
Hawaii was never really on our radar as top places to visit... sure, it's hot and has nice sandy beaches, but we're not really the beach resort type of vacationers. But that started to change after a friend of ours came back from a vacation to Hawaii (attending a destination wedding no less) and said "You should go... I think you guys would really like it". When someone says something like that the first thing you gotta ask yourself is "how well does this person know me... is she really telling me what *I* would like, or what *she* would like?" Well in this case I was pretty sure Tam had a sense of what kinds of things we enjoy so I started asking her about and when she mentioned all the waterfalls, rainforests and nature, the door was opened wide.
In planning our trip we of course wanted to do ALL of Hawaii but neither time nor money would allow that so we decided to choose 2 of the islands to explore. We cut out Oahu right away... too populated, touristy and busy. From the 3 main islands left it really came down to how easy it was to get from one to the other and soon we had narrowed it down to Maui and the Big Island... two very different places as we found out on our trip.
The other big decision was to choose camping as our primary lodgings. When you have to fly somewhere it doesn't matter if you'll be car camping or wilderness camping at the end location, you have to pack light. So we invested in good sleeping bags for the kids and a new lightweight tent. These expenditures proved to be worthwhile investments to make camping in Hawaii a reality... in doing so we ended up paying less than $100 for 3 weeks of vacation. Not bad considering we'd be warned how expensive accomodations in Hawaii would be!
The trip was absolutely fabulous. We learned tons about Hawaii... its nature and its culture. We experienced a ton of firsts - first overnight hike with the kids (in a crater no less!), first kayaking adventure with dolphins to keep us company, first time snorkeling (well only Sam and Rubby did real snorkeling, but Christopher and i did our best!), first luau, first submarine ride, many foody firsts including ohelo berries and guavas which we picked in the wild, and many wildlife firsts including nenes, honus, and spinner dolphins. The list goes on, but hey, I don't want to give it all away in the intro... ;-) To quote Sam: "When are we going back to Hawaii? Cause I just can't live my life not going back to Hawaii at least once!"
