Aloha & Mahalo

This was my first trip to Hawaii and our first real tropical vacation together. It was so much fun! And of course beautiful. I definitely missed my boys and thought about them and worried about them, but we knew they were in good hands with grandma Judy. Aka "Papa" - That is what Gavin calls her and that's what I'll call her the rest of this post. When we left, Ethan was down and out with the flu, the one I had passed on to him, and Gavin is only two and I worried that he wouldn't know what was going on when mom and dad didn't come back for over a week. But kids are resilient, and they got over it. And we had fun - alone! I admit that when we saw families with small children it made me miss ours, but at the same time it made me glad they didn't come with us. It seemed like too much work for a vacation. Does that make me a bad parent? It'll be fun to take them in a few years when Gavin is a little older.

The morning we got back I went in to get Gavin. I slowly opened the door and peaked in on him, he was standing up in his crib, smiling, and anticipating Papa. When he saw me instead of Papa he looked shocked and fell to his knees in a crawling position and froze. I slowly approached his crib on my knees and told him I was back. He didn't want to look at me. He stared either down at the mattress or at the wall. After about a minute I was finally able to coax him into looking at me and letting me hold him and we went and hung out with daddy in bed. It didn't take him long to warm back up to us.

We traveled from Boise to San Jose on a small plane, the type where the propellers are out in the open air (something you don't see too much these days on newer planes) and we actually went outside to board the plane. It didn't help my nervousness of flying on an older plane as we watched various people go in and out of the cockpit. We never found out what was going on exactly, but we made it to San Jose...late, but luckily made our connecting flight without getting the chance to pee. I hate peeing on planes. We landed in Honolulu, lugged our luggage out of the airport, down a ways to another building, found out we were in the wrong place, then headed further away into another building where we caught our next flight to Kauai. We waited for a while in the small interisland airport. We realized we should have brought snacks cause we were too cheap to buy a $3 cookie. Eventually we did anyway and quickly realized that everything is overpriced, there's no getting around it.

After getting over the exhaustion of traveling all day and the shock of the almost $500 car rental for 4 days, we ended up here, at the Kauai Beach Resort. We had a beautiful view. We ate our breakfast every morning out on the lanai, watching the waves and the surfers and the paddle boarders. It was lovely.

Our days were filled with exploring and the evenings were spent in the hot tubs. It was the perfect combo. We were so tired, most nights we were asleep by 10:30.

By the time we arrived at our hotel it was late afternoon and it gets dark by 7pm so we just had time to eat an early dinner and check out the beach.

The first night we got our map out and decided we'd explore Kauai's east coast the next morning.

DAY 1
We found our way to "Baby Beach," called that because people bring their babies there because the water is so flat. We were just about the only ones there and we just relaxed on the sand. The water seemed so warm the night before near our resort, but I cringed when my toes touched the water at this beach so I didn't go in.

We continued further up the coast and found this cool lighthouse. We stopped at another beach and hung out for a while. It was cold and windy so again, we didn't get in the water. We saw some snorkelers out in the water and found out at that at that beach you can usually find sea turtles within 5 minutes of being in the water. We hoped to be able to come back sometime when we had snorkel gear. Unfortunately we didn't have time to return to that beach and I never got to see sea turtles while snorkeling for the rest of our time in Hawaii. Oh well, maybe next time.

 We then headed up to Hanalei Bay. It's a cool little town with shops. It's where I experienced my first shave ice (note: it's not shaved ice with a d, but shave ice). The waves there were by far the best we saw our whole trip because they weren't huge and they weren't tiny. They were perfect for boogie boarding, body surfing, and surfing. I was sure the water would be warmer on some other part of the island, but quickly learned it was the same everywhere and after a minute of being in it, it'd be bareable. I didn't learn that until the next day, so I didn't go in the water here either. Chad braved the water and went body surfing for a while, but I sat on the beach and braved the rain instead. It was still enjoyable. I'm glad I brought a sweatshirt (the only sweatshirt I had on the trip, I might add).

DAY 2
We headed south. On our way south we made sure to find Costco and buy some snorkeling gear. We didn't want to miss out on any more underwater sea life.

 We loved this tunnel of trees

 This is Poipu Beach. This was probably one of my favorite spots in Kauai. If you look behind me you'll see the sand bar that separates the water. We did some fun snorkeling on both sides.

 I loved the chickens and roosters everywhere on Kauai. On the side of the road. At our resort. And yes, they even hung out at the beach.

Salt Pond Beach. This was another cool spot for snorkeling.

To be continued... (I think I've blabbed enough for one day)