As I mentioned in my last honeymoon recap post, and back in March, it turned out to be cheaper by about $1,000 to have a 23 hour layover on Oahu, instead of flying home directly from Kauai.
And what did that mean? Bonus honeymoon afternoon and morning in Waikiki!
We sadly left our beautiful house on Kauai at about 9:30am, stopped in Hanalei for some souvenirs, and dropped off our snorkel gear, beach gear, and the rental Jeep. Around 1:30 in the afternoon we landed on Oahu, and we were ready to explore! After a $30 cab ride to our hotel, we discovered at check in that our room wasn't quite ready, so our rush to see as much of Waikiki as we could in an afternoon was interrupted by one of these, while we waited for our room. After about 45 minutes we were able to check in, and were pleasantly surprised by this pretty view from our spacious balcony, in an only $135 a night with tax room (that's a good deal during the summer in Waikiki only a block from the beach)! We dropped our bags, put on almost the last of our three bottles of SPF 75 sunscreen (yup, we used that much, but didn't get a sunburn, always a goal for me on vacation with my pale skin!) and went in search of someplace to eat a late lunch. We walked down to the beach and in and out of several hotels before ending up across the street at Margaritaville. We shared their lunch sized volcano nachos. But this huge pile of nachos was still nothing compared to the dinner sized nachos, which we've had at their Vegas location.! After walking around a lot more, and visiting the International Marketplace (a big sort of flea market area right next to where we stayed) for more souvenirs, we went to the Hula Grill for dinner. Here we are at the bar waiting for a table. Notice my cute new earrings and matching necklace Mr. Cola bought me! :) Friends of ours (aka a bridesmaid and groomsman in our wedding) had recommended we eat at the Hau Tree Lanai, but after looking at their menu, Mr. C was in the mood for something a little more casual. And he had some delish ribs for dinner, but not after sampling our second best crab cakes of the trip. The view was stunning from the Hula Grill, although it wasn't a direct sunset view. (Waikiki was so pretty, but we both agreed that we had been spoiled by the quiet and seclusion of Kauai, which was much more our speed than the crowds of Waikiki. As you can see above, even at night the beaches here were quite busy.)
The next morning we woke up early and took a cab about 10 minutes up to the Diamond Head State Monument. Our goal was the top of the volcanic crater, where the small white building is in this picture. To get there it was a good climb up a series of trails, stairs and tunnels. But the view and cooling wind from the top was completely worth it! And it felt great to stretch our legs before our long flight home that afternoon. A side note here: you might have noticed that in only a few of our pictures from our honeymoon am I wearing my hair down, most of the time my hair was in pigtails. That's because my hair is so long and thick (read: hot and hella heavy), I can't wear regular ponytails anymore without it hurting my neck. But I love my long hair, and have worked so hard at growing it out and keeping it healthy that I'm definitely not ready for a Post Wedding Chop anytime soon. So my solution for keeping my neck cool and not aching on our honeymoon was pigtails!
After cabbing back to our hotel, packing and cabbing to the airport, we had lunch at Gordon Biersch at the Oahu airport. I had my very last crab cake of our honeymoon here, and it was, well, an airport crab cake in a chain restaurant--it was about as good as frozen crab cakes! (That's ok though, I like crab cakes so much I'll willing eat a frozen one on occasion to get my fix!) (You know, after writing all these honeymoon posts, it seems I have a weird obsession with crabs or something. Apparently I like to watch them, feed them, poke at them, and eat them. But I swear, I took lots of pictures and ate lots of different animals on this trip! They just didn't make the cut when it came to pictures to show you! ;) )
Our flight home left on time, and surprised us by giving us a fantastic aerial view of Diamond Head. And we were also treated to one final sunset, as we neared the mainland. Ahhhh, if only our honeymoon could have lasted longer..... So that was our honeymoon, as concise as I could make the 2,400+ photos I took! It was everything we could have hoped for, and we thoroughly enjoyed it all, that is, until the day after we got home.
We came home to an extremely unpleasant and disrespectful "present" that my mother had left for us in our home. Or rather, did to our home. I won't go into details, because just thinking about it makes me shake with anger, but lets just say she made an ridiculously poor decision that was absolutely not hers to make (and that could have been avoided by at least eight better options I can think of, the first being to effing call us, leave a message, and let us make the decision ourselves), leaving us to deal with the fallout upon our supposedly joyous return from our honeymoon, when we only wanted to decompress before returning to work the next day. My dad even brought to my attention the fact that this idiotic decision on my mother's part was probably just a great way to start our marriage in Mr. Cola's eyes, now that he knows his new MIL makes very bad, rash, out of place choices. Mr. C is refusing to comment, and vowing to stay out of it, and I won't mention it again on here, besides this mini-rant. But I felt my displeasure had to be voiced to give an accurate portrayal of our honeymoon, since this put a huge cloud over it. Now, every time we look back at our honeymoon and the start of our marriage, we'll have to remember this unpleasantness too, and much of the respect that I'd been forming for my mother over the past few years is pretty much out the window now. It's such a shame too, if it had been handled properly, it would have only been a minor annoyance the first day of our honeymoon, but instead it turned into this whole big issue because it was purposely hidden from us.
Anyway, the end of that, and truly, before we got home, our honeymoon was awesome, and I would highly recommend Hawaii to anyone, especially the north shore of Kauai. And now, onto more fun, wedding-related posts!
Want to see a one minute glimpse of what Mr. Cola and I woke up to every morning we were in Kauai? I took this video lying in bed. Sigh, wish I was back there now, listening to the softly crashing waves!
And it only got better a few minutes later. But maybe this post needs some mood music?
On day 6 of our honeymoon we woke up even earlier than we had all week to go on our snorkel adventure up the Na Pali coast. We had to check in for the trip in town at 6:45am, where we were given juice and donuts, followed by a van ride to the water and a canoe transfer to our boat. The trip was with a company called Na Pali Catamaran, and I can't recommend them enough, since they're one of only two companies that have tours leaving from Hanalei; most tours leave from the south side of the island, and you waste a bunch of time just getting to the Na Pali coast.
Here's a look at our cute little boat. It was a small tour with only 16 people max, so it wasn't crowded at all, but be sure you get on the first trip to the water on the van--you want to get a good seat on the boat for the scenic trip up the coast like we did! Inside one of several sea caves the boat went into. Only small boats like this one can enter these caves, and only on really calm days. Us, in front of a waterfall inside another sea cave. The gorgeous jagged cliffs of the Na Pali coast. No wonder there are no roads along here! After motoring up the coast for about an hour and a half, we had about an hour for snorkeling. I got to see a sea turtle (one of my goals of our trip!), and swam after her for a little bit. So amazing to see in real life!
After getting our fill of snorkeling and eating an early lunch on the boat, it was a quick and wet ride back to Hanalei Bay, where we arrived by about 11:30am. We had the rest of the afternoon to spend on the beach in front of our house, but I wasn't in the mood for lounging, I was in the mood for PLAYING (although my sand castle building skills do leave much to be desired and I managed to bruise my ribs and arm while boogie boarding)! I also found another stick to play with, but this time I didn't use it to poke at crabs, I used it to do some sand writing. And of course I was thinking about the Hive! But then this happened! Oh well, we all know weddings rock too! ;) The next morning was our final day in Kauai, and we decided to get in a little more relaxation. Or, Mr. Cola got in some relaxation, I spent my morning finding more awesome crabs to watch! I also found this white stuff washed up on the beach, and I thought it might be part of a dead fish, so with a stick, I put it next to a crab hole. Apparently whatever it was, the crab loved it. Free meal! I can't get enough of Discovery Channel and National Geographic, so it was fun to make my own video of this cute little crab going to town on his lunch!
Mid-afternoon our last full day on Kauai, we drove a few miles to the "end of the road" where you can't drive any further because it's the beginning of the Na Pali coast. Along the way we stopped at a huge dry cave. We spent the late afternoon and early evening on Ke'e beach. The hill in the picture below is where the Na Pali coast starts! I, of course, couldn't sit still, and while Mr. Cola soaked up the rays, I jumped in for one last snorkel. Other than seeing the sea turtle, this was my favorite snorkel of our trip! "OMG, look, a rare and endangered Kauai chicken!" (Just being silly, the chickens were everywhere!) As the sun began to set on our final night on Kauai, we ate sandwiches and Mr. Cola opened one of our last precious bottles of Lone Oak Cabernet, which we'd brought all the way from California to enjoy. This is the wine that, 5 years ago, made me actually appreciate red wines, and we've been saving our last few bottles for only very special occasions. This definitely qualified! Sigh....best sunset of our trip! As the sky darkened and our bottle emptied, we headed back to our house where I made salmon for dinner, and we soaked up the last bit of our glorious honeymoon.
....but wait! Remember this post from back in March? The one where we discovered it would be cheaper to do a 23 hour layover on Oahu than fly directly back home from Kauai?
Well that's up next, I'll be concluding our honeymoon recaps with our bonus honeymoon day!
While the first few days of our honeymoon were pretty relaxing, the middle part of our honeymoon was action packed!
On day four we drove all the way back down to the airport to go on a helicopter tour of the island. All the travel planning sites touted a helicopter tour as the only way to properly see the island, and I completely agree with them! Even Mr. Cola was stoked after our trip, and he wasn't even very excited about it to begin with, because it is on the expensive side. For our ~65 minute tour around the whole island it was $458 for both of us, but well worth it in my opinion. I think this next set of photos from our tour deserves a little mood music. We literally flew over a rainbow in the helicopter, although it didn't really photograph up close.
After taking off, our pilot told us some of the history of the island, and some neat tidbits on the many movies filmed on Kauai. In my opinion he did a great job of balancing informing us with letting us enjoy the scenery in quiet. Also, Mr. Cola and I had the two best seats on the helicopter, in the front row, and there was a neat window near the floor on the front that we could look down through. I'll spare you the over 500 pictures I took on our tour, but here are a few of my favorites, starting with us in the helicopter! One of probably over a hundred waterfalls we saw from the air. This is the falls featured in the Jurassic Park movie. Flying over Waimea Canyon, aka the Grand Canyon of the Pacific. Over the Na Pali coast. This coastline makes up about 1/5th of Kauai, and there are no roads along this entire stretch, so you can't actually drive around the whole island. The small bay in the middle of the below picture is Ke'e Beach, the further medium sized bay is Tunnels Beach, and the big bay at the top of the picture is Hanalei Bay. Our house was about half way between Hanalei and Tunnels. A closer view above our adorable beach house. Wailua Falls from the air. Posing with our helicopter. They recommend you wear dark clothing so you don't see the reflection of what you're wearing as much in the windows. After our amazing helicopter ride, we decided to do a little sightseeing as we traveled the 1 1/4 hours back to our house. Here's Mr. Cola by Wailua Falls that we had just flown over 20 minutes prior. 'Opeaka'a Falls. We sampled the best pulled pork on the island for lunch at Scotty's BBQ in Kappa'a, and then I had to go check out the palm trees on the beach! On our way back after lunch we stopped at the Kilauea Lighthouse and the cliffs next to it, which is a seabird preserve. That night we walked even further down the beach to see yet another beautiful sunset. But notice the dark clouds gathering.... We went from looking like this: To this, in a matter of minutes! In Kauai there are several daily showers, usually in the morning or early evening, and usually only sprinkles or misting for 5 minutes or less. Not a big deal, usually. But we happened to get caught in a massive dumping of the sky, and hiding under the sparse trees next to the beach wasn't going to protect us! So we had to duck under one of the many empty, raised homes being built next to the beach to wait out the rain. It was quite hilarious actually, because we were soaked and stranded under a house, which we joked belonged to Craig T. Nelson.
[Ok, sidebar for inside joke] Our helicopter pilot had mentioned Craig T. was a homeowner near where we were on the island, and when I was about 4 years old I'd had a big crush on him. I was convinced at the time that he wasn't going to get any older, he was going to "wait for me." So in our completely wet and dripping state, it was cracking us up to think we might be cowering under the home of my former star crush!
Anyway, after the rain ended about 10 minutes later, we came out of hiding and ate dinner at the resort down the road. They didn't seem to mind that we were wet, for as much as it rains in Kauai, I'm sure we weren't their first wet diners.
The next morning it was time to check out Tunnel's beach, with has some of the best snorkeling on the island. Later that night we had the best crab cakes of the trip at Postcards Cafe in Hanalei for dinner. (Sorry, I'm one of those people who likes to take pictures of yummy food!) And they even give diners a postcard when you pay your bill! Coming up next, the Na Pali coast from a boat and stalking sea turtles!
I have a deep love for shoes, anything with garlic on it, and all things DIY. Just a West Coast chick adjusting to life in the South with my husband and 3 kitties. To pay the bills I'm a marketing communications professional, but my true love is crafting and working on decor projects. And now that we are homeowners, I love taking on bigger renovation projects side-by-side with my husband, as we strive to make our new house a home.
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We dropped our bags, put on almost the last of our three bottles of SPF 75 sunscreen (yup, we used that much, but didn't get a sunburn, always a goal for me on vacation with my pale skin!) and went in search of someplace to eat a late lunch. We walked down to the beach and in and out of several hotels before ending up across the street at Margaritaville. We shared their lunch sized volcano nachos. But this huge pile of nachos was still nothing compared to the dinner sized nachos, which we've had at their Vegas location.!
(Waikiki was so pretty, but we both agreed that we had been spoiled by the quiet and seclusion of Kauai, which was much more our speed than the crowds of Waikiki. As you can see above, even at night the beaches here were quite busy.)
(You know, after writing all these honeymoon posts, it seems I have a weird obsession with crabs or something. Apparently I like to watch them, feed them, poke at them, and eat them. But I swear, I took lots of pictures and ate lots of different animals on this trip! They just didn't make the cut when it came to pictures to show you! ;) )
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