We Had a Honeymoon!

Ok. Finally. I am starting this blog post about Liz and my Hawaiian Honeymoon!
Our flight out of Midway left EARLY, so early we had to leave our hotel at, I don’t know, 2:30am? This isn’t a photo of us leaving at 2:30am, but it gives you the idea of what Liz and me being in our hotel lobby was like.

But the nice thing about leaving Chicago so dang early in the morning is you get to Maui around, what was it, noon or 1 or something? I hadn’t been since I was 15 and the airport was mostly like what I barely remembered it being like. When I came to Hawaii as a 15yr old I noted how everyone else had rented convertibles so this time I decided: Convertible!

We zipped over to our hotel to check in and drop our bags off before zipping back over to our first Hawaii attraction…
(Here are hotel establishing shots)

Hawaii Attraction No. 1? The Maui Tropical Plantation tour!

Then followed that up with dinner at the plantation’s Mill House restaurant

And then back we went to our hotel.

Day Two, or Full Day #1 — we wake up in Wailea and walk from our hotel to the ones next door, past the White Lotus, and to where the condos started then turned around and came back, had some breakfast, explored our hotel a bit more, and then had pool time!

Then we drove up to Lahaina and ate lunch at Cheeseburger in Paradise, which I had eaten at on my trip to Maui when I was 15. Seemed about the same! Walked around Lahaina a bit and saw some sights I sort or remembered from that 1992 trip.

Then we drove up to what I’m going to ignorantly call “the north coast of Maui” and took a walk along the coast all the way to the Ritz before coming back down to the Lahaina area for a wonderful dinner at King Noodle. During the walk we sure saw lots of people getting their sunset beach portraits. Beach portraits like crazy! Oh and we also popped into a grocery store and wound up buying a box of Kraft Instant Spaghetti Dinner which we would later eat in Columbus.

Day Three: Had a traditional Hawaiian McDonalds breakfast to get us the energy we needed for our next big activity: a visit to Haleakala national park where we learned it is a LOT easier to hike down into a volcano crater than hike out of it. Holy smokes! Don’t let the smiles totally fool you, it was a lot of work!

After our hike we had an absolutely bangin late lunch at Da Kitchen — really wish we’d “found” this place sooner and gone there more—and then took a nice walk around our hotel and the coast by it before calling it a Maui night one last time.

Day Four — Saying goodbye to our hotel, overrun with runners, then grabbing breakfast at a nice place the name of which I cannot remember or find right now, then returning our car and catching a flight to Oahu.

Get to Oahu, deal with a rather curious car rental situation that turns out to work out quite well, and head straight for the last Pearl Harbor tour of the day

Then we decided to grab a little dinner at an L&L Barbecue since we loved our dinner at Da Kitchen the day before.

Then we took the super beautiful drive up to Laie (no pictures) and got milkshakes from the place the Obamas go. Angel’s Ice Cream. I think that’s it. And we also noted that there was an L&L in that same shopping center.

And then we went over to our home for the next few days: an amazing cliffside condo leant to us by Carol and Geoff. Holy smokes! What a place! What a view!

Day Five — got up, walked around our neighborhood, checked out the private beach and then had smoothies and loco moco at, uhm, the nearby L&L Barbecue!

Then we drove down to the Macadamia Nut farm store before getting lunch with Carol and Geoff (HUGE mistake: did not get a picture from this) before making a visit to the Laie temple AND, well, getting dinner at L&L Barbecue.

Day Six — We heard the thing to do was watch the sunrise at the end of our little peninsula so that’s how we started the day. Then I went over to the grocery store to check things out and we spent the morning at our local private beach before some general Laie activities like eating fried fish, corn dogs, visiting BYU, going to the part of the Polynesian Cultural Center that’s like Downtown Disney, and taking a hike up to a World War II pillbox that turned out to be a little more demanding than we had expected. Then we enjoyed the North Shore a bit as it got darker and darker and, uhm, got L&L Barbecue for dinner (No pics)

Last Day: And the honeymoon ends like it began: Early! Got up early, drove to Honolulu, dropped off our rental in a really odd manner (but everything worked out) and enjoyed a nice and easy flight back to Chicago with a nice and easy layover in, I don’t know, Phoenix or something? All I know is wherever it was, they didn’t have L&L there.

Okay, now I just need to blog:
-Misc April-June Columbus Stuff
-New York Summer Stuff (including visitor posts!0