Planning for Hawaii

Aloha! In May I will be travelling to Hawaii with some friends! Some familiar and some making their Travelling Minions debut!

FunkyCat and Vino will be once again be travelling with me. Some of you will remember FunkyCat from our adventure through Japan in 2017. Vino Joined Gimpy and I when we visited Croatia after travelling through Turkey

Meanwhile, we’ll be introducing three new friends: Lebron, Antetokounmpo (Don’t ask me why!), and Cactoose (A cross between a goose a cactus) on this trip!

This trip is something that I’d been talking with Lebron and Antetokounmpo for a while. Antetokounmpo is currently going through a nursing program at school and will be finishing in May (Congrats!). So Hawaii is something of a celebration trip for her. As plans started to solidify, Cactoose, FunkyCat and Vino all signed on to come along at different times!

Hawaii has always been one of those places that I’ve wanted to go to but never had the opportunity to. I guess it’s close enough that I figure I could go anytime, but far enough that it needed to be its own destination. Many are quite surprised that with the number of places I’ve visited, Hawaii isn’t one of them. This will change in May!

I’ve heard quite a bit about how great Hawaii is, and so coming up with a list of “musts” was fairly easy. So my list of must do’s are:

1. Skydive
2. “Hike” Diamond Head
3. Visit Pearl Harbour and the USS Arizona Memorial
4. Eat all the unique and delicious things Hawaii has to offer

What helps with planning a trip to Hawaii is there are flight deals from Vancouver all the time. Thankfully we were able to find sub $300 direct flights to Honolulu with WestJet.

Because we are only going to spend a week in Hawaii, we decided to only stay on the Island of Oahu. This made logistics a little easier, so our next decision was whether or not to spend all our time in Honolulu. After some discussion with the entire group, we decided to split our time between the North Shore and Waikiki. We found and booked an AirBnB in both places.

To get around, we rented two cars for the 6 of us. This allowed us some flexibility in moving around and gives us the option to split up if we need to.

With all the logistics sorted, we set out looking into the fun stuff! After a bit of research, Antetokounmpo and I decided to do our Skydive with SkyDive Hawaii. Thankfully booking in advance gives us a little discount so we set up our dive for our third day in. This gave us an opportunity to get settled, but also a chance to try again if weather prevented us from going on our scheduled day.

I also looked into visiting Pearl Harbour. I’ve always been a bit of a history geek, so having a chance to visit this piece of history has always been high on my list. What’s great about it, is that most of it is free and as long as you respect the rules of it being an active military base you’re fine to visit. However, I was a little bummed to learn that the USS Arizona Memorial would be closed when we are in Hawaii. There are repairs being made and thus not open to visitors. While I would have loved to see it, I’m still happy to be visiting the rest of the site.

Past that, between the six of us, there is a huge list of food places we want to visit. There simply is not enough meal times available for us to eat it all. But you can be sure that we’re going to try and hit as many as we can.

Overall, I anticipate this to be a fairly relaxed and easy going trip. Most people tell me that you settle into “Hawaiian time” which is a more relaxed pace. Given how busy early 2019 has been, I’m really looking forward to the change of pace and the chance to rest and recover a little. I’m excited for the group of friends we have going and am looking forward to all the cool experiences that await us!