Hawaii Recap

This is L-O-N-G, sorry!

So I should start off by saying that before this trip I was a Hawaii skeptic.  Everyone said it was so fabulous, but I was kind of wondering what made it so different/better than the Caribbean.  I decided Dave and I definitely need to check it out while we live in the PacNW because who knows how long we'll be living here (I have not so secret dreams of either moving back to the midwest one day - home prices what?! or moving somewhere warm warm warm like Arizona).

So over Thanksgiving we assessed the vacation time off situation after using a shit-ton for the wedding and realized we could swing a week off over New Year's since we wouldn't need to take as many vacation days (and my ever so generous GM gave us 2 extra free days off over New Year's weekend).

We decided to go to Oahu because it was cheapest to fly into and we used hotels.com/hotwire/priceline for our two hotels.

We arrived in Honolulu about 11:00 at night and headed to our hotel and went to bed.

Saturday, December 30th: Tons and Tons of driving around to acclimate ourselves to the island, so unfortunately, not much working out this day.  But, we did walk around the new Disney resort - which is super posh and not overtly "Disney"

The next day (NYE) we hiked Manoa Falls, which was just gorgeous!  It was about 1.5 miles round trip but felt like a lot more because of the elevation gain.

We ended up pretty muddy, but decided to see what else we could find to do and where we could eat lunch.  On the way to lunch, we stopped at the Pali Highway lookout, which was a gorgeous view.  A quick search on my phone revealed that there was a short hike on the old Pali Highway.  We decided to try that.  It was a VERY  steep downhill, and since it was an out and back, it was also a very steep uphill! we got about a mile down the road before the road kind of disappeared so we turned around and headed back to the car.

We then drove up to the north shore and sat on the beach and watched surfers. We came home and went out to a fancy dinner, opened a bottle of champagne on our roof (realized it tasted like crap) and fell asleep at 10:30.  Rockstar New Years Eve over here!

New Years Day we drove back up to the North Shore to go on a whale watching cruise.  It was awesome!  We saw a few whales and a few people saw a shark too!  After we were done there, we went to the Dole Plantation and had Dole Whip - yummy pineapple flavored soft serve!

On the 2nd, it was time for us to check out of our first hotel and move to a hotel on Waikiki Beach.  they upgraded us to a corner room which was awesome, the only stipulation is that it had 2 double beds.  If you know us, you know this is not an issue.  While we love sleeping together, we reserve at least one night a week to sleep in our own beds.  During marathon training, Dave slept in the guest bedroom every Friday night so I wouldn't wake him when I woke up to go on my long runs Saturday morning.

On the 2nd we hiked Diamond Head to watch the sunset.  It's a pretty steep elevation gain with a few sets of gnarly stairs.  They said to allow about an hour to get to the top, especially if you're not in great physical condition. We were super worried about missing the sunrise... we made it up in 18 minutes!

We actually started heading down to one of the lower lookouts because we thought the cloud cover was too much, but then we saw it! (excuse our sweatiness!)

I was feeling so good when we got back to the hotel that I decided to go for a run.  There was a woman and man running around the same pace as I was, so I made it my personal mission to stay in front of them (geez, competitive much?)  That led to 2.75 miles in 27 minutes.  Not bad for not running for awhile.

On this day it was time for us to check out of our first hotel and move to a hotel on Waikiki Beach. they upgraded us to a corner room which was awesome, the only stipulation is that it had 2 double beds. If you know us, you know this is not an issue. While we love sleeping together, we reserve at least one night a week to sleep in our own beds. During marathon training, Dave slept in the guest bedroom every Friday night so I wouldn't wake him when I woke up to go on my long runs Saturday morning.

The next day we did Pearl Harbor and went back to the Disney Resort to see if we could sneak in and use their pool.  No dice, so we hung out on the public beach and then went to a luau, which was really fun!

The next few days blur together quite a bit, so I'll just give one big update :)

We did a 3 mile hike that was honestly the hardest hike I've ever done.  It was SO muddy!  we were sliding all over the place, but the resulting view was worth it:

The last morning we were there we went snorkeling at Hanauma Bay.  AMAZING!  there were so many fishes that were brightly colored and they were so close to the shore.  it was awesome.

Alright that's it for now.  My exercise over the last few days has been painting! I painted our living room/dining room/kitchen (it's all one big great room) and the dog's bedroom (don't laugh, with a 5 bedroom house and no plans for kids, the dog has her own room too!).