Our big trip for 2017 is Ryan & Amanda’s Hawaiian Hiatus. Our trip features a 7 night roundtrip Norwegian Cruise from Honolulu. This ‘Part 1’ blog post features our travel over to Hawaii, our first two days in Waikiki beach, and getting over to the boat. It will be a bit wordy at first, but I promise there will be some great pictures for you if you stick it out.
Our trip got off to a bit of a rocky start, we had packed our bags so that our essential items were in our carry-on bags. Our carry on bags have been across the world with us over the last 5 years without issue. Apparently the regular travelers from GSP to CLT are well aware that the gate attendant for American Airilnes is a Carry-On-Nazi. My bag was about 1 inch over the guideline diagram, Amanda’s was less than inch too big. They both fit comfortably in the overheads for wide body aircraft and 737s, and we were flying first class, cashing in almost all the frequent flyer miles I’d saved up flying back and forth to Saudi Arabia, so there were fewer passengers / more overhead space per person. She took our bags. This was especially concerning because we had a 35 minute layover in CLT with a terminal transfer required, when we got to the plane they were 7 minutes away from closing the gate… we began to doubt our bags had moved as fast as we had.
While we were waiting to takeoff I was running through some work emails on my phone when it died in my hand. The battery didn’t die… the phone did. RIP Nexus 5X. My phone was our map, our uber hailer, our calendar, our restaurant guide, and of course, my go-to camera. This was not a good development.
After arriving at DFW, while waiting to board our final flight for the day, from DFW to Honolulu, we realized that sometime in between checking our seats last night and printing our tickets at GSP that morning, the aircraft had changed and our seats has be re-assigned. For some odd reason AA decided to essentially split all couples up in first class despite having more first class seats on the new plane (there were more because they weren’t as nice seats and had less space)… This wasn’t a hard problem to solve, we were one of the first two people on the plane, and I quickly switched seats with the woman who was assigned to sit next to Amanda. (she ended up switching seats 3 more times as couples continued to consolidate)
Upon touching down in Honolulu our bags gave us a scare and took a while to make it to baggage claim, but they made it eventually. And then all of a sudden everything started going well.
The shuttle got us to our hotel without issue, the hotel was beautiful and the bed was incredibly comfortable…
We started our trip at The Royal Hawaiian, also known as the Pink Palace of the Pacific, a landmark in Waikiki beach. It was one of the first hotels constructed on the beach, and is now protected as a member of the Historic Hotels of America by the National Trust for Historic Preservation. It’s first guest ever was the deposed monarch of the Hawaiian Kingdom. FDR frequented the hotel during his Presidency both as a vacation destination and a base of operations when meeting military commanders in the Pacific. It is sadly our final Starwood employee family discount stay. It truly is the end of an era for our travel lives.
We loved the hotel’s open air architecture.
This bed hit the spot after a 18 hours of traveling.
We need to consider The Luxury Collection Store, next time we buy linens.
… and we got matching pink robes.
Amanda caught a nap, while I wandered around the hotel grounds. Afterwards, we went out to grab a late bite. We ended up wandering around a bit more than we’d have liked as I was without a phone, and Amanda’s phone had horrible reception in Waikiki and didn’t seem to get very good location tracking from Yelp. After poking our head back into the hotel our Concierge recommended Roy’s.
While it was more upscale American cuisine and less local Hawaiian than we were looking for, it did give us our first chance to try a Hawaiian staple. Poke, essentially Sashimi cubes covered in a sauce. Next time I’m in Hawaii I want to eat lots more of this, and probably more authentic less foodie versions of it.
We were able to grab no wait seats at the open air covered bar and split an app, steak, desert combo that hit the spot just right as our 4th meal in our 30 hour day.
The next morning I woke up at 4 AM to find Amanda wandering around our hotel room. She had been up for 2 hours. I got out of bed and we began preparing for our planned activities that day, which included a hike of Diamond Head. The Volcanic crater shown below from the beach of our hotel. The park opened at 6 AM so instead of grabbing a $20 taxi to the park entrance we just decided to walk the 2-3 miles from our hotel.
Along the way we grabbed coffee and breakfast at the Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf… our new favorite coffee chain that we can’t have unless we are travelling.
Around 7 AM the hike is pretty well packed with jet lagged tourists…
From the top we got a great view of the Honolulu skyline and our hotel. Notice the small pink stucco building below shadowed by the Waikiki high rise hotels around it. (3/5 of the way right, 2/3 of the way down)
About this time the alarm clock on Amanda’s phone went off telling us to wake up. We had already walked about 5 miles, including up this small mountain.
Various points along the ridgline of the crater have built in military watchpoints from the 1930s-40s.
This picture shows the interior of the crater. The building infrastructure is the park headquarters and bathrooms. In the top center of the photo you can see the tunnel under the outer rim of the crater which provides access to the park.
And a video captured by Amanda providing a panoramic view from the top.
On our way back we hung along the beach and got another view of our hotel.
And this tree.
Upon arriving back at our hotel in the late morning we prepared for our next hike… out of Waikiki and to a downtown Honolulu Verizon store. After about 24 hours of mostly failed trouble shooting I determined my phone wasn’t coming back and that my only choice was whether or not I’d solve this problem fast enough for it to benefit our trip. It was another 2.5-3 miles into the business / local resident district of Honolulu.
After pacing back in forth for 10 minutes in the Verizon store, unhappy about my second consecutive Nexus Phone lasting only 18 months, I made the brand switch to a company I’ve been trying to avoid. Bad timing and lukwarm reviews for Google’s Pixel phone landed me with a Samsung Galaxy S8. Thus far I’m pretty satisfied, it has a great great great camera, but a somewhat quirky screen unlock. Hasn’t caught on fire yet, which is a plus.
We grabbed some Hawaiian barbeque at a local place in the business district. This was nice as it was hard to find real authentic local food in Waikiki. I went for the Lau Lau and Amanda got the Kalua pork. The Lau Lau wasn’t bad, but I strongly regretted my decision as Amanda’s Kalua pork was amazing.
Later that afternoon we checked another local hawaiian staple off the list with shaved ice. I had read a lot about shaved ice and how it was so highly regarded in Hawaii, but never quite understood what all the fuss was about… it just sounded like a snow cone to me. I soon figured out this was not your average snow cone, each quadrant of the bottom of this bowl had a different fruit, some of them rare and tropical. We had not intent of revisiting shaved ice again, but were glad to have sampled the Hawaiian tradition.
Amanda dreams of a day when I do what she says and smile for all her pictures.
Surfboard lockers line this ally between hotels leading to the beach.
This adorable couple seemed pretty worn out in the hotel lobby.
Our Verizon sales person had told us Duke’s Waikiki had the best Fish Tacos we were going to get in Honolulu. Duke’s was about a half mile walk from our hotel on the sidewalk, and about a 50 yard walk from our hotel if we walked on the beach, which we did not discover until after taking the long way.
Friday nights feature a fireworks show by the Hilton Beach Club. We walked a few hotels down the beach to this pier to capture the show. We got there early and Amanda found a good rock for setting up the tripod.
Some examples are below. Amanda used a 4 second exposure to capture the entirety of a firecracker’s explosion.
Then Google decided it needed to show off how smart it was.
Saying goodbye to the Royal Hawaiian, and our amazing Starwood Friends & Family discount. Between the depletion of frequent flyer miles and no longer having a Starwood discount, we are going to have to learn to live with a lower standard of travel.
We were among the first groups onto the cruise ship, the Pride of America, a Norwegian Cruise Line ship. We did lunch in the main dining room, avoiding the crowds at the buffet, and enjoying a table with a view.
After lunch, while they were still preparing our room and boarding the ship we found a mostly unoccupied sundeck with a city view and shade covering all the lounge chairs. The pool deck was packed at capacity at this point, but this gem of a spot was mostly unoccupied.
While I relaxed, read a bit, and worked on setting up my phone Amanda headed to the top levels of the ship to see what she could see. Not long after, we heard a call over the PA system that our deck’s rooms were ready for occupation.
Coming up in our next post… Maui, featuring Haleakala National Park, and the Big Island, featuring a Helicopter tour of Volcanoes National Park.