Colas in Kauai: Right Near Da' Beach...BOYEE!

Alright, where to start with describing our honeymoon? Amazing. Fantastic. Beautiful. And so. much. fun!

But I'll try to keep these honeymoon recaps to just a couple posts, and make them picture-heavy so you can all see what we did, since I know seeing vacation pictures is a lot more fun than just reading about it!

It started early the Monday morning after our wedding, with us driving to the airport in a zombie-like state, exhausted from the previous week, and our plane took off on time. Not only was the 5 1/2 hour flight the longest I'd ever taken, but I had my first experience with actual airplane food! It was a semi-warm vegetarian breakfast burrito and muffin, and it was as I had expected--gross!

After an hour and a half layover on Oahu, we landed safely on Kauai, and got our rental car from Budget. Where we ended up paying twice the cost quoted on our reservation--yes, they talked Mr. Cola into an upgrade, the insurance, and the pre-paid gas. Oh well, it was our first car rental experience, and we definitely learned from it to get the insurance, but ignore the rest of their overzealous sales pitch. We just wanted to get to the beach!
Mr. C with our Jeep, just after we took the T-tops off. We had planned on a regular convertible, but at least we had plenty of room in this!

We took the gorgeous hour and fifteen minute drive up the coast to the north shore of the island, stopping along the way to pick up our rented snorkels, beach gear and groceries. Once we arrived at our beach house, we were blown away!

Our house, called the Kauai Love Shack, was everything we could have hoped for, and even better in person than any picture could describe! It was literally right on the beach (and Mr. Cola said the Dave Chappelle quote in this post title several times during the week too, in reference to our house location)!
The front of the house from the lawn

View from the front porch

View from the bed. There were gorgeous views just like this from the living room/dining room, kitchen and bathroom too!

We quickly dropped our things and walked the five steps outside to check out our beach before the late afternoon sun faded. It was so beautiful and private; the entire week we never saw more than about ten total people at any one time.

Just around the corner of the beach there was a small resort which we walked past several nights to see the sunset.
And there were a TON of different types of crabs on the beach to keep me entertained. Because, yes, just like a 7-year-old boy, I am easily entertained by animals and nature. Don't believe me? I will even poke (what we think are) dead crabs with a stick, as documented in this video.

Yeah, I'm a dork!

The next day we awoke to a beautiful sunrise without even getting out of bed, and spent the entire day on the beach in front of our house, just trying to recover from the crazy amount of activity the week of our wedding.
I highly recommend Bubba Mugs for keeping drinks cold on the beach, and the flip top lids are great for keeping the sand out too! (And notice, I'm wearing my robot tank top that I also wore in my boudoir pictures. Mr. Cola loved his present!)

That evening we walked down the beach to attend a luau at the Hanalei Colony Resort, and it was fantastic! It was put on by a family and their friends, and it was very intimate and entertaining. Great Hawaiian music, wonderful food, hula and fire dancers....so much fun!

The next day we drove out to Princeville and hiked down a canyon to snorkel at the Queen's Bath. The Queen's Bath is a pool formed in volcanic rock, and little fish get swept in it by the waves. You can only swim there on calm days though, if the seas are rough, waves can knock you off the rocks and pull you out to sea. Luckily we visited on a calm day!

Following our snorkel and hike back out of the canyon we ate lunch in town, and then went and checked out the historic Hanalei Bay Pier.

Then, after a nap and another afternoon on the beach we ate dinner at the Hanalei Dolphin restaurant, and my amazing HUSBAND (ah, still not used to calling him that!) bought me a beautiful lei.
Up next, our helicopter and snorkel adventures!

P.S. If anyone would like more info about the house we stayed in, places we ate, tours we took, etc, please Private Message me. I'm a big fan of writing travel reviews, so I have a lot more details that I'm not going into here, including things like price, driving directions and menu recommendations!

(all pictures in this post are personal photos)

Honeymoon Planning: Love Shack, Baby Love Shack!

Since we couldn't go back to Mexico for our honeymoon right after the wedding because it's the wrong time of year, we used a very scientific method for determining our destination. Ha! No, really all we did was say to ourselves, "Where can we go that will be sunny, warm, not too expensive, and not too long of a flight?"

For the past 10 years or so, I'd always dreamed of going to Atlantis Resort in the Bahamas for a honeymoon, but it didn't meet the criteria of not being too expensive or too long of a flight from California. Le sigh!


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Next, we started thinking about Fiji or Tahiti...but the dreamy above-water accommodations were WAY pricey, and a 7-8 hour flight was a bit on the long side, considering we'll be leaving the Monday after the wedding and be exhausted.


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So the only other alternative we could think of that met the criteria was Hawaii, with a 5 hour flight from San Francisco. Now, I've always wanted to go to Hawaii, but at first I just wasn't that excited about it for our honeymoon. I had just always pictured some place more exotic/special/unique/romantic for some reason. But then, Trip Advisor came to my rescue! After Weddingbee, it's probably my favorite website, the forums there are great, and I was able to describe what we were looking for, and tons of people responded with great suggestions.

So now we have a honeymoon destination: the island of Kauai. It is the least developed and crowded of all the islands, so hopefully we'll be able to capture a bit of the feeling from when we visited Majahuitas Resort on the private cove in Mexico. And to further that goal of seclusion, we decided to rent a private house on the beach!

Enter the Kauai Love Shack! After about a month of research, it was the only 1 bedroom house directly on beach of the north shore I could find, so we booked it (we didn't want to pay thousands more for a bigger house, why waste money when we only need one bedroom?).

And without further ado, here is what we'll get to enjoy for one whole week after our wedding!


{All Kauai Love Shack images from the Vrbo listing}

Now for the price tag, which was at least $2k less than all the other houses we looked at:

$45.00 - Reservation Fee

$1000.00 - Security Deposit

$3141.95 - Total Rent including 11.4166% Tax

$200.00 - Cleaning Fee

$4386.95 - Total

We've already put down half of that, and the rest is due in March. We can't wait! The only downside is since we won't be at a hotel, we will have to do some cooking ourselves. But I'm thinking we'll stock up on sandwich and salad fixings to make our own lunches, and just drive the 4 miles into the town of Hanalei for dinners. Or we can also take a romantic walk down the beach about 300 yards to a small resort that has an on-site restaurant.

How did you pick your honeymoon location? And will you be going right after your wedding?