We take one big vacation each year and it usually centers on our anniversary and my birthday as they are just a few days apart. This year, we had enough airline miles to take the three of us to Hawaii for taxes and baggage fees. Not too shabby. The planning started in November when I found the mileage deal. Chuck picked the hotel a few weeks back and that’s where the planning ended. We don’t like to plan our vacations hour by hour. Most of the time, we will do enough research to know what we want to do and take it day by day. And that’s what made this trip so awesome.
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We boarded our fight to Honolulu on Saturday afternoon with a short layover in L.A. Ava loves to fly so we are pretty lucky. After a few silly pics with Chuck’s phone, we were on our way.
Chuck got me (us, really) an iPad for my birthday. Ava and I spent a good hour playing Words With Friends and she kicked my butt. Our flight landed in Honolulu around 10:00 p.m. local time Saturday night so we booked it to the hotel to sleep off our jetlag and rest up for a week of fun.
This was the view from our balcony on Sunday morning. The very first thing we saw was a beautiful rainbow in the sky. Pretty kick ass way to start a vacation, right?
The view on the ocean side of our balcony was amazing. There is a protected area for swimming on one short strip of beach and a nice section with waves on the other side of that pier. We spent the first day on both beaches, all working on some pretty awesome sunburns. When you are having that much fun, reapplying sublock is the last thing on your mind, right?
Ava slipped into the aloha lifestyle seamlessly, just like her mom. She couldn’t wait to hit the beach.
Here is a closer view of the chill beach right across from the hotel. This is the southern tip of Waikiki and it was so much less crowded than just a few hundred yards to the north. We never had any issues with finding spots on the beach nor were there ever too many people in the water. Maybe it’s because we were there during the week? Who knows, who cares? It rocked regardless.
Sunday was our 16th wedding anniversary. We know that it is number 16 because we both pulled out our phones and subtracted 1997 from 2013 to make sure. Really, we weren’t positive it was 16 otherwise. And we found out that we both assumed it was number 17 after we started discussing the traditional gifts for our anniversary. As I rattled off silver bar ware items, Chuck looked at me and laughed. He had done the same research for the wrong year earlier that day. Great minds…
For our anniversary dinner on Sunday night, we hit up our favorite Thai restaurant in Waikiki. The last time we were there in 2009, we ate there twice. The food is so good that we ate it too fast to take a proper picture to share with you.
Ava wasn’t too keen on much of the menu, but she tore up some vegetarian spring rolls. Literally. She ripped them apart and ate the insides with chopsticks.
After dinner, we headed back to the beach for a while, then the pool then off to sleep. The five hour time difference had us tired at 7 p.m. and up at 6 a.m. every day. Even though we were kicking it like senior citizens, it was really great to beat the crowds everywhere we went.
There’s more to come! I’ve got some great pics of each day from our trip and the fun family things we did on Oahu. Stay tuned.
Mahalo!
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