Day 0 | Day 1 | Day 2 | Day 3 | Day 4 | Day 5 | Day 6 | Day 7 | Day 8 | Tips
Day 0
Ahhhh, the perils of traveling. So this trip is a family one. All four of us went on this adventure. It’s the boys’ Spring Break after all. Haven’t made it to a beach for Spring Break since 2019 😢. So this year we are off to Oahu, Hawaii!!
However, this trip didn’t get off to the best start. 😕 It started actually 3 days earlier when Will broke his prescription sunglasses frame. While he was at school I rushed off to LensCrafters to see if I could get the frames replaced. I scored in that they had another set of the same frames! They just popped out the prescription lenses from the broken frames and put them in the new ones. So that was a success!
Then the morning we are leaving, he was determined to get to target when they opened to get new earbuds because he lost his. 🙄 He seemed to be taking longer than expected, so I pulled out the stalker app (that’s what we call the Apple “Find My” app) to see where he was. He was at his job. So I texted him asking what the hell he was doing. He said he left his sunglasses at work last night. 🤦🏼♀️ Yeah, the ones I rushed to get fixed so he’d have them in sunny Hawaii! Then Bill comes downstairs, and I tell him the situation. He looks on the counter and asks “He’s missing those sunglasses?” while pointing to Will’s sunglasses on the counter. Yeah, my oldest isn’t so bright this Saturday morning.
So our driver arrives to take us to the airport. I shuffle all the luggage in the front foyer out onto the front porch for the guy to load in the car. We all pile in and it’s off to the airport!
As we arrive to the curbside checkin, I walk ahead to get the process started when my youngest, Charlie, comes running up to me with a panicked look on his face. He says “Where is my suitcase?!?! You said all the luggage was in the car!” First off, I said no such thing. Second, he’s a man-child and has been responsible for his own luggage for a few years now. So I go to our security camera app and look at the one set up in his room to monitor the Guinea pig. And what do I see on the floor? His freaking suitcase!!! Oh man….this is going to be a looooooong vacation. 🤦🏼♀️ Yes, you heard that right….we took off to Hawaii WITHOUT MY SON’S SUITCASE!
Made it to LA just fine for our 3hr layover. And the actress Storm Reid was sitting in the seat in front of Will the whole flight! Of course I had to scope out her Insta to see why she was in Denver. She had actually been out to CO on a ski trip. Thelma and Louise behaved and made it on the flight. And with 3 hrs in LA, they should have plenty of time to catch our flight to Hawaii.
We got into Honolulu about 9pm. Decent time to land (local time), but dang I was exhausted since it was 1am to my body. Thelma and Louise made it just fine. If only we also had Charlie’s luggage 😩. Hopped in our beast of a rental SUV and headed out to our hotel.
We tend to stay in Hilton properties (since I have the most points with them). I chose the Hilton Grand Vacation complex for this trip. But it was crazy confusing!! I’m sure we’ll eventually learn our way around here, but for first timers, it was chaotic. Once we got to the right check-in counter (there are like 4 or 5 towers in this village – all Hilton properties), I got all the things and then me and the boys headed up to our room with the luggage while Bill went to park the car.
I prepaid for self parking, so his room key should’ve got him in. It didn’t work. So he came back to the desk, and they reissued him a room key card only to have that one not work either. They said to just get a ticket and use our card to get the car out. We’ll see how that works tomorrow 🙄
I got Thelma and Louise emptied and stowed away, then crawled into bed to hopefully sleep til the sun comes up.
Day 1
Since I’m usually the first one up, I had planned to walk to the ABC shop to grab some quick breakfast foods for all of us. I was also able to take in our views from our balcony since it was nighttime when we got in last night. I could get used to this!
I had pre-planned two excursions for today: a submarine dive in the morning and a Luau for dinner. We would’ve had about 4 hours to have beach or pool time between the two, but alas that time was spent at Walmart getting Charlie some cheap clothes to make up for leaving his suitcase at home 🙄 Yes, he was stinky boy on the submarine. What can you do? 🤷🏼♀️
For the submarine dive, we had to take a boat about a mile off the coast to board the submarine. And the pier/dock to catch the boat was off the beach for our hotel village complex. So it would be easy to wrangle our jet lagged butts out to it.
The submarine went down to about 100ft. There were several underwater structures that were purposefully placed there to try to rebuild the reef off Waikiki Beach as the natural coral has almost completely died off. Some due to pollution as the island gets more populated and some due to the sand that is shipped in to make up Waikiki Beach.
We saw several different fish as well as sea turtles. The other side got to see a black tip reef shark, but our side wasn’t as lucky.
At these depths everything is pretty much blue due to the inability for light to penetrate down from the surface. Red is the first color to drop off the color spectrum. Will had some red in his shirt and yep, it was just a brownish color.
After the dive, we had to make the trek to Walmart. Charlie got a new suitcase and a week’s worth of clothes. I got a cute souvenir t-shirt and the boys all got Hawaiian 🌺 shirts to wear to the luau 😜 We definitely spent way too much 🤦🏼♀️
We got back to the hotel with barely enough time for me to shower and all of us to get ready for the luau. The drive out to Sea Life Park was absolutely amazing! I can’t wait to get back out on that drive when we are not constrained with a timeline to get somewhere.
When we got into Sea Life Park, we walked around a large aquarium with lots of fish and a shark in it. The path wound its way to the area where they had the tables and stage for the luau. There were several different areas along the perimeter where you could do different things. Like weave hats from palm fronds, play the ukulele, toss nets with balls on the edges to simulate casting nets for fishing, hula dancing and a couple of other things. We were slackers and didn’t participate in them. They also had a native climb way up a coconut tree. I could never do that!
Next they unburied the pig that had been roasting in the ground all day to serve in the buffet (although to be honest, I think it was just staged). It was so juicy and flavorful!
Then their hula performances were a journey across the islands that make up Polynesia. There were New Zealand, Samoa, Tahitian, of course Hawaiian and a couple of others I’m now forgetting. They finished off with what they called fire knives, but really batons lit with fire on the ends. There was a 17 year old Hawaiian native who is the current world champion in this sport that performed for us (at least that’s what they told us).
Then it was back to the hotel to pass out.
Day 2
Oh my, what a day we had today. Our morning started out desperately trying to find a spot for breakfast. I don’t think Hawaiians find this a priority meal of the day. Last night I thought I had found a spot we could check out before heading to the harbor to catch our boat to go on a Whale watching cruise (more on that in a minute).
Waffle and Berry was the chosen spot. We find the place only to drive around a few blocks without any noticeable parking. 😩 So I say screw it, let’s just hit up the IHop. As we drive by the front, there is a stupidly long line waiting to get in. So we decide to just drive out to the harbor where we will catch our boat to chase whales and see if there a place nearby. At this point an hour has gone by which seriously dips into our breakfast time I had planned for.
We get checked in for the cruise (Majestic by Atlantis), and they share there is a coffee/food shop a block up. We check it out and grab some breakfast sandwiches then head back to the boat. We get our vacation photos taken then board the boat.
I’m torn between calling the Majestic a boat or a ship. It’s got 3 stories. The first and second are enclosed with tables and chairs. The third level is open air with tables and chairs as well. I never made it to the first level, but the second had a full bar and snacks for sale. It was air-conditioned too. So a good reprieve from the sun.
Speaking of the sun….I had a spray bottle and face stick of sun screen in my daypack. Never freaking put it on!! I was so fried by the end of our 2.5 hr whale watching cruise 🤦🏼♀️
Back to the whales…The first one we came across our guide said was “sleeping”. They are in this twilight phase where their subconscious keeps them coming up for air so they don’t drown, but they aren’t doing too much. Then we came across a small pod that had a mother, baby and possibly a male escort. Hard to know if it was the father of the baby, but males will protect a mother and their young in hopes of being the next father. We stayed with these guys for a while and then went off and found another small pod that looked to be a similar makeup: mother, baby and escort.
I didn’t have anything else planned for this day, so while we sat in the parking lot, we were trying to figure out what we wanted to do next. After a spell, we all thought it would be fun to just drive around the side of the island we saw last night heading out to the luau. So that’s what we did. And mother nature definitely did not disappoint!
The eastern side of the island is so beautiful with little rock islands just off the shore. And the mountains reaching down to kiss the ocean. Simply beautiful.
As we were making our way around, we came upon what I would call a food truck encampment. There were 10-15 food trucks scattered around off the side of the road with about 5-10 tented booths of souvenirs. We pulled over and the boys & I got funnel cakes and smoothies. Bill went for some kalua pork tacos. And not one photo was taken here 😞
We continued our trek getting back to the hotel at dinner time. Since it had only been a couple of hours since our food truck snack stop, we opted for pizza by our hotel since we could keep leftovers easily in the fridge. We also made a stop at the ABC Store to grab some aloe gel for my fried upper torso. Of course the others had spots too that were starting to show sun burn.
Day 3
I was really looking forward to today’s pre planned event, but I was not liking the clouds hanging over the tops of the mountains 😩 Today it was helicopter time!! Followed by the USS Arizona Memorial.
All these excursions I’ve planned have these check-in times that are 30 min before your thing starts. The helicopter is an hour 😳 So in my “anxiety to be places on time” mode, we arrived about 10:45am (needed to be there at 11am). They fit us with our life vests and play a safety video. We go through all that and it’s 11:15 🤣. So we end up waiting for like 40 minutes until they take us out on the tarmac.
This company (Rainbow Helicopter Tours) operates out of the Honolulu airport. The same one we came in on. So there are commercial airliners landing and taking off right in front of us!! This airport is also shared with the military, so we saw F22s taking off too!
When checking in, Will said he wanted his door open, so he had to wear goggles and a jacket. Charlie wanted his shut (Bill was between them in the back). I got to ride shotgun. I ended up reserving the whole helicopter just for us (which was good because we filled it anyway 🤣 the seats were tiny and we are not!). We load up in the helicopter and took off really fast.
Even though the mountains were socked in the clouds, the coastline is still quite beautiful. No more than 5 minutes up, we are able to see a pod of whales in the crystal clear waters. Then we spot another one doing flips and spins all by himself. The pilot said he was doing a mating dance. But I saw no other whales nearby. So maybe he was just practicing? 🤷🏼♀️
Lots of crater mountains along the coast. It was cool to basically do the same path we drove yesterday, but up in the air. To see all the things from a different perspective.
**Note – I am currently working on how to get videos edited and uploaded in a way to share. So stay tuned!
Since the airport is relatively close to Pearl Harbor, it was a quick drive to a Five Guys for lunch before heading to the USS Arizona Memorial.
The USS Arizona is managed by the National Parks Service. The memorial is a structure that is built over the top of the sunken war ship, therefore you have to take a boat out to it. As with other national monuments (I’m thinking of the Washington Monument that we were never able to get tickets for when we were in DC last summer), you have to get a ticket to ride the boat out to the memorial. To get the tickets, you have to either get them 8 weeks out (they go quickly) or try daily 24hrs before you go. I didn’t know about this 8 weeks out, so when it was about 4-6 weeks out from our vacation, and I was planning our adventures I saw I couldn’t get tickets as all the early releases were gone. So each day I needed to try to get the 24hr released tickets. On Day 1 I was too late and they were all gone. So on Day 2 I tried and was able to get our tickets for today.
Going out to this memorial was a solemn experience. There are over 900 souls that are still resting at the bottom of Pearl Harbor with this ship. They were young men ranging in ages from approximately 19-27 all still down there. There were certainly more lives lost that day in 1941, so I’m just referring to those that were on the USS Arizona that are still in the harbor with their ship. Definitely a tragic day for the United States. Then again, all wars are tragic. I was honored to pay my respects to these souls, but wish it didn’t exist in the first place.
For dinner this evening I was able to get us a reservation at AOKI Tappanyaki, a Japanese hibachi table restaurant in our Hilton village we were staying. We all definitely ate WAY too much food, but it was tasty none-the-less. 🤤 And I did my motherly duty of buying all 3 of the souvenir photos they took of us 😂 (yes…for every adventure we did, I bought the touristy photos!).
Day 4
Today I had planned a private boat charter to take us snorkeling. Just the 4 of us and our guides. One perk of this excursion was the boat picked us up in the marina next to our hotel. So no driving around with gps that doesn’t work for shit in Honolulu. Yes, full 5G bars at all times, but damn if the mapping apps don’t work half the time. Not sure what causes this. I was just happy this morning we had an easy 6 min walking commute.
OMG! This snorkeling adventure had such good potential 🤣 But it wouldn’t be a Rands adventure if things went as planned! At the first snorkeling spot Bill threw up like 10 times. I kid you not, the fish LOVED him! They were gobbling up all he was putting out as quick as he put it out. He rallies and gets back in the boat. I felt a little nauseous when I got in (and I don’t get motion sickness! I think it was physically seeing him throw up).
We ride around for a bit so it’s not a boat rocking in the ocean making him more sick. Then he pukes some more all over the side while we are flying through the ocean! At the second spot he’s just in the water constantly puking feeding the fish. Made for good entertainment. 😂 The fish, not the puking. 😜
After a while, I decide to get in the boat because I was shivering as the water was chilly. Again, I don’t feel right and lean over the side of the boat puking my brains out! 🤦🏼♀️ I mean COME ON! What?!?!?! At this point I think it may be the food we had the night before. Both boys are doing fine. But Bill did eat the rest of my meal. Another possibility is we could’ve been dehydrated and the rocking of the boat and ocean just put me over the edge. I have never puked from motion sickness in my life. I’m the one that sits and reads books while driving through mountain roads! Bill actually dry heaved before we left the hotel room. So if we weren’t right to begin with, the boat could’ve just been making it worse.
The best part was we rented a go pro for the excursion. So Charlie got shots of the fish gobbling up Bill’s puke, and Will got shots of me hanging over the side of the boat puking 🤣 Fucking priceless!! I can’t wait to get the videos from the adventure company!
However, we did survive and made it back to land although with a little bit of wear and tear on our bodies. Charlie wanted to continue having water fun, so Bill rented a big wheel paddle boat type thing. But it was stupid expensive!! $68 for one hour!!! Are you freaking kidding me?!?!? But I think the kid had fun either way, so that was good.
Bill and I decided to be lazy and lounge around to recover a bit. I watched a couple of episodes of You, then hopped in the shower. Dinner was at a random spot we picked with Google and hot damn it was good! If you are in Oahu, you should check out Scratch Kitchen. 🤤
We decided to finally have a family movie night (since Will started working last fall, we’ve fallen out of our Friday family movie nights which started like 12 years ago 😢). Tickets were procured for Cocaine Bear. Completely unrealistic, but that didn’t stop it from being entertaining 🤣.
Since most of today’s adventures were captured on video, I thought I would share a collage of street art I took pictures of. It’s very common for buildings to have beautiful street art on the sides of their buildings. It was EVERYWHERE. Not a lot of messy tagging, but actual works of art. I was definitely diggin’ it.
HUGE shout out to The Adventure Boat for making the adventure video for us of our day out snorkeling. They were such good sports about Bill and I yacking all over the place. And made us not feel quite so bad about it haha!
Day 5
We were going to work for our vacation today. I was able to get park passes to Diamond Head Crater. Yep, it was hiking time! If you aren’t familiar with Diamond Head, it’s a pretty iconic land feature off the eastern edge of the Waikiki Beach area. It butts up to the ocean and can’t be missed. As a former military defense location, you can still see bunkers today built into the side of the crater. When you enter, you park in the center of the crater. Then they have a paved trail for the first portion of the hike. It’s .8 miles to the summit from the trailhead. It’s not a long hike, but dang it’s straight up in some spots! But the views are worth every step it took to get up there.
Diamond Head is a state run park. Locals can go for free, the rest of us have to pay. It’s $5/person and $10 for parking. And you do have to get tickets in advance as they regulate how many people can enter per day. Your tickets give you a 2 hour window to explore the area. Our window of time was from 10am-12pm. It took us about 1.5 hrs from leaving the car to getting back down. And we did a lot of stopping to take pictures.
After our morning hike, we decided to have lunch at the Highway Inn. This restaurant was recommended by two different friends and was a local cuisine place. I got the kalua pig sliders (as did Bill and Charlie). Will went on more of an adventure and got a combo plate to experience several different local items.
Then we headed back to the hotel room to chillax. As par for the course of vacations, before we knew it, it was off to eat more food. Will had brought up finding a Mexican place. So we ventured off to Covina De Rosa. Now mind you, this is a VERY simple place. There were minimal items on the menu. They were all variations of birria tacos. Basically shredded beef. But hot damn they were good! If you get birria, it always comes with an au jus dipping sauce/broth. I struggled dipping a taco in a cup of broth, but it was fine with or without it.
After filling the bellies, it was back to the hotel for lights out.
Day 6
Today and Saturday were two days I had not pre-planned anything. Will really wanted to go explore the hiking trails on the island, and he had found one called Manana Ridge Trail. Per his research, he said it was like a 6hr hike. I said no thank you to that. Charlie really wanted to just hang out in the hotel room (which was really like a condo – it was 2 bedrooms, 2 bathrooms, kitchen, dining room, and living room…oh yeah and 2 balconies). Bill and I were going to rally yesterday to head up to the Dole Plantation, but realized the hiking trail Will wanted to do was on the way. Therefore, we decided to do it today instead. And after talking about it, Charlie said he would just join us.
After breakfast in the room, we all piled out to the rental to have our separated day of fun. With all of Will’s Colorado hiking and 4wheeling, I was ok letting him trek off by himself. We dropped him off at the trailhead and the 3 of us went up to the Dole Pineapple Plantation. We get there and buy combo train & garden tickets. Then we learn it’s an hour and 45 min wait for the train ride 😳 Ok, fine…we’ll wait. We have nothing better to do while my oldest is out god knows where trekking through the mountains of Oahu.
They have us move up into the train waiting area, which is covered, and then the skies just opened up. Like torrential downpour. Definitely thankful to have just been moved to the covered area. Then I start to panic that Will is going to get caught in this. Bill opens his special weather app and sees this system is just sitting over us. Whew. I can take it. We have another hour of waiting…covered…so all is good. Another fortunate thing is that Will has cell reception the whole time on his hike. That is definitely different from CO hiking! So we are able to stay in communication with him the whole time. Although he was sending us some sketchy videos of the terrain he was going through. NOT for the faint of heart! Hopefully by time you are reading this, I’ve figured out a good way to share videos. If not, I’ll get to it eventually.
The weather gods were on our side, because by time we are boarding the little train after almost 2hrs of waiting…the sun came out and there was no more rain! Woohoo! After all that waiting, it was a “meh” 20 min train ride around a tiny portion of the farm. We had texted Will to start heading back when we got on the train as he was hours into his hike at this point. And after we got off the train, the three of us did the garden walking tour. Again, “meh”.
After all that outdoor fun, we went into the shop and went stupid buying souvenirs. 🙄 But it all worked out just fine. Almost perfectly to be honest. We literally got back to the trailhead not 5 minutes before my beaten and battered eldest son came walking out of the trailhead. That boy got WORKED in the jungle!!! He was tired as hell and looked a horrible mess. At this point it was 5pm and none of us had eaten since breakfast. I knew Will liked Raising Cain chicken, and Pearl City had one not 2 miles from where we were. And that my friend is what we had for dinner.
We headed back to the hotel so Will could take a much needed shower. We also learned that the Hilton Village does a fireworks show every Friday night (I wonder what THAT costs the complex?). At 7:45pm off it goes. A nice cap to a very busy week of vacationing.
Then it was pack time. I had booked us a redeye flight on Saturday that would take us into Los Angeles Sunday morning, then on to Denver (also Sunday morning). But our hotel said we had to be out by 10AM and no late checkouts were allowed. Ugh! Ok….fine. So packing tonight it was and getting out in the morning a must.
Day 7
Back on our helicopter tour, the pilot shared a valley that he said had movie tours. Back on our honeymoon, one place we visited was Kauai and we did a movie tour on that island. So I did a little research and found the movie tour place for Oahu and booked it as an excursion on this last day. It was for 3:20pm and you had to check in 45 min before your tour. But before that…let’s get to our 10am checkout time.
I don’t know how many rooms our lagoon tower had, but there were 23 floors + a penthouse. We were floor 6. With hundreds of people all having to check out at 10am, can I tell you there were no elevators to be had!! After like 5 stopping on our floor all full, I decided to try a different trick. Elevators going up may be more empty, so we’ll ride up to ride down. An up elevator stops and there is room for 2 of us with luggage (Bill had left earlier to get the car out of the garage and meet us out front). Charlie and I get on and leave Will to fend for another one. Mainly I left him behind because he kept making snide comments that I was of low intelligence to go up to go down. Whatevs dude. Then you wait for a down elevator that can hold you. Guess who got to the car first? Me and Charlie. We had to wait a bit for Will to show up. And guess what he had to do? Go up to go down. Ha!!
Once we are loaded up in the car, we start driving out east again. Randomly picking a place on Google Maps to eat. We pick a place called Jolene’s by the Bay. It was a minimalist place, but the food was decent. Then we drove up the coast towards Kualoa Ranch stopping at a macadamia nut farm to check it out. Kualoa Ranch is a working farm/preserve/movie location that has these movie tours. I couldn’t get tickets for 2 other tours I would’ve preferred as they were sold out, but glad we could get the 90min movie tour none-the-less. We were quite early for our check-in time (it was 1pm, check in was 2:35pm), but they let us check in early. Since we had 2 hrs before we needed to get in line for the tour bus, we decided to leave and drive up the coast some more.
Will found a place on Google Maps that was some sacred burial ground area. I was in flip flops and the grass was high and mosquitos in full effect, so I sat in the car while they walked around for about 15 minutes. When they came back we headed back to the ranch.
The movie tour was interesting for sure. The land was another old military place, and had some bunkers in the sides of the mountains. One they had converted to a movie memorabilia bunker, so we stopped there and walked through it. Another stop was the bone graveyard from Kong Skull Mountain. Kind of funny seeing the bones from that scene that were all styrofoam 🤣.
After the movie tour, Bill had found a cave & lookout area on the southwest side of the island. We hadn’t been out that way yet, so why not. 🤷🏼♀️ The cave was very cool indeed! However, the sun was just about to set so we didn’t spend too much time in there. Then we watched the sun dip below the horizon out over the pacific ocean. A wonderful cherry on top of a quite memorable time on the island. Bill and I high fived to a great family vacation.
Then it was off to the airport to return the rental and catch our flight back to the mainland.
Side notes….(this one is perplexingly bad) we didn’t spend one day on the beach. I don’t know how this happened. I mean, our hotel was on the beach. We just had so much going on, we never felt deprived I suppose. I mean, who the heck goes to freaking HAWAII and doesn’t go to the beach?!?!?! This motley crew of 4 apparently. The other Hawaiian vaca fail was we never managed to get any shaved ice. I mean what?!?!? That is what these islands are known for! We have issues. We have serious issues. And I’m speechless about them.
Day 8
This day is really just a blurred continuation from Day 7. We had the redeye flight from Honolulu to Los Angeles. I slept a little on the flight, but nothing substantial. We arrived in CA, and I was happy to see Thelma and Louise made it across the Pacific with me. We landed about 6:45am in LA and boarded our Denver flight about 8:45am. We got out just in the nick of time as about 10:45am, a passenger on another Delta flight opened the door on the tarmac and released the slide 😳 Not sure what delays that caused for other flights out of there.
But alas we made it back to Denver just fine. Thelma and Louise also behaved and made it on the flight to come home with me. We gathered all our luggage (one more than we left with since Charlie got a new suitcase and clothes) and as we are heading out the door, there is an announcement that all gates need to quit boarding immediately. I couldn’t get out of there fast enough before something more drastic like shutting down the airport happened haha!
We made it. Back to the mainland, back to Denver and back home. Now for that much needed vacation from my vacation!
Tips
Here are a few tips should you head off to O’hau Hawaii. They are not listed in any particular order.
- If you want to visit the USS Arizona you need to plan accordingly. As I mentioned on Day 3, you can get tickets starting 8 weeks out, but they go fast. They do a second release of tickets 24hrs before. So if you can’t find tickets at the 8 week mark, you will have to try daily during your vacation. These tickets are run by the National Park Service.
- If you want to visit Diamond Head Crater, you have to buy tickets for admission in advance. This is a state run park, so their process is different from the National Park tickets.
- In general, things can get booked out quite far. So if you want to do any of the touristy stuff, make those reservations out as far as possible.
- If you want a relaxing Hawaiian vacation, Waikiki Beach is not the place. Honolulu is a major metropolitan city. It’s busy. And the Hilton Village complex is crazy. It felt like Spring Break in Cancun, but with families (vs drunken college kids). It was an experience for sure, but when I come back I definitely want more chill vibes. So keep that in mind if you are planning a trip to Oahu.
- If you want to go exploring, rent a car. At first we weren’t going to rent one and just Uber/Lyft, but about 2 weeks out I changed my mind. And I’m glad I did. Hopping in the car and just driving was a great way to see places outside Waikiki Beach.
- If you are a breakfast person, do some heavy research before you go. We had a really hard time finding any kind of decent breakfast places. I don’t think this is a priority meal on the islands. We are breakfast folks. So that was a bit of a bummer. And maybe there are some there we just didn’t learn about them. Please share with me if you have suggestions!
- Cell phones surprisingly work well on most of the island. However, we found the gps/maps not working great in the city (Honolulu). Not sure why. And it was with multiple devices: 3 different cell phones and car gps. It doesn’t refresh/keep up when you are driving. We missed so many turns often (only in the city, not when we were further out).