Hawaii
Hawaii was fun, but definately could have been better.
The big detraction for me was that my wife was stressed out all too often. Every time we got in the car, it was a high stress situation and it carried over into the rest of the vacation. Brook ended up driving after the airport to the hotel portion of the trip. The issue was, my insurance doesn’t cover me on someone elses car, and she wasn’t convinced that every credit card in my wallet probably covered me. A little background, Brook is a horrible navigator if she doesn’t know where she is going from personal experience. Since she doesn’t know Hawaii, I didn’t want to be the driver with her navigating, so I happily (at least initially) let her take over driving responsibility.
If I were to do it over, taking a cab or a the bus would have been preferable. We rented a Jeep Laredo, with gas, valet and rental fees was almost $600. That works out to $100/day to spend on transportation. Considering the main objective was to sit on the beach, and our hotel was litterally on the beach, that is plenty to cab it between the hotel and airport and go to dinner. To get to the other side of the island, a bus would be needed to be affordable, or then we could have rented a car for the day. If you are in Waikiki, you can rent just about anything within a couple blocks, and if you want a badass car, they will bring it to you.
I also would have liked to spend more time with my friends. We had lunch together once, went surfing together and sat together at the wedding. But only at lunch was it conducive to catching up. Another shared meal would have been ideal.
We ruined many a meal by eating way to much. We had three supersized meals everyday until the last days. Food is definately going to be covered in another post. The food was good, but showing up for a 5 course meal, and not being hungry…
The last minor thing was an incident between a rock and my foot. The beach in Waikiki is not completly sandy and there are still quite a bit of volcanic rock sticking out of the sand. So the full day I am watching the surfing members while I am standing chest deep in the waves. A wave came up and knocked me back, and I put my feet down to catch myself, putting a two inch cut in the sole of my foot. And also learning that I should float with the waves when it is deep enough. We wasted the next day with me trying to figure out what to do about my foot. Superglue and medical tape came to the rescue.
If driving wasn’t such a large portion of the trip, it would have been a lot better. We spent one entire day in the car driving around the island, we made the trip to the north side of the island two more times and drove to dinner almost every night. I never arrived anywhere for 6 days in a good mood.
I had fun doing everything we did. Everything we did, except transportation was fun. Every beach that I didn’t want to go to, I had fun at. I had fun watching surfing. The wedding was a lot of fun, and the wedding coordinator might actually do stand up. And there was lots and lots of good food. No poi.
Now that I got the bitching out of the way, I will come back and post some details on the enjoyable parts.