We’re back from our trip last week to Kaua’i. I’ve been slowly organizing the photos and getting them up and out. I’ve been debating how to handle the vacation write up here. For Ireland I did a day by day journal but I had more photos then. I’ve decided to go with a day-by-day entry again but days will be merged together or skipped when necessary.

Day 1: The Flight Out

At 3am we woke up and groggily made our way to the Airport for a 6am flight. After a lovely psudo-winter filled with little snow and 60 degree weather mother nature decided to thwart us with a slim layer of snow on the ground. Our flight wasn’t going to go out in the current conditions. Of course, they had already let us board the craft and made us sit there while did dances to the math gods to determine how our little airplane that coudn’t could. Turns out, after their math samba, we had to lose 4 passengers or lose the luggage and they were looking for volunteers.

An hour later, 4 or 6 passengers fewer, and one de-icing later we were off. We made it into Chicago with five minutes to spare. I’ve never run through an airport before, but since they airport gods decided that our first flight and second flight needed to be as far away from each other as possible without actually being on opposite sides of the airport, we ran and just made it to spare.

Nine hours later we where in Honolulu.

The Honolulu airport is amazing–most of it is open to the outside and you have access to little sitting areas. We enjoyed some outdoor space until I was tired and then waited for our last flight to Lihu’e, Kawa’i.

In Lihu’e airport, we heard people talking about a car accident and horrible backed-up traffic but were reassured by our welcomer that it was north of our hotel and not to worry. We pulled out of the airport for our 5 minute drive to the hotel. One hour later we made it to the Hilton Resort. For most of that hour we were in a parking lot watching roosters wander by.

All Honolulu airport photos can be found here.
All Hotel view photos can be found here.

We decided to take day two easy. After waking up we wandered the beach outside our hotel then drove our little rented Ford Mustang to Lihu’e and north to Kapa’a for shopping. That’s about it. Dull but there you go.

I don’t have beach photos ready yet. They’ll be up again later because I am quite mean.

We are horrible at planning vacations. There are so many places we want to visit that we can never narrow it down. Once we finally decide on a place, then we can’t figure out what to do. At times, it’s frustrating.

Two years ago we spent ten days in Ireland. Originally, we were thinking of going on an Alaskan cruise or Hawaii. We were being good and had narrowed it down! But I’m not a fan of boats thanks to a stupid (and I do mean stupid) boating accident and the more I thought of a cruise the more panicked I felt. Then we found out how long the trip to Hawaii was. ELEVEN hours. Ugh. I had never been in a plane before and we thought that doing a shorter trip would be best. Surely European countries were longer. Right? Wrong.

So to Ireland we went and we didn’t go on a vacation since.

Sure, we went on long weekend trips, but it’s not the same. We had decided it was time to go away for a week or so and had decided November would be the best time. Then we hit November and couldn’t decide on a local so pushed the target back to December, which we didin’t hit.

See where I’m going with this? We are awful at this. But finally, we decided. Well, we went to a travel agent and had him help us to decide. Sometime in 2007 (being a bit vague here), we will be flying 11 hours to spend 7 days in Kauai. Now we just need to figure out what to do.