168 hours (and change) in Oahu

Happy Easter! For the first time in many years I did not sing in Easter services — but that’s because we got back this morning from spring break in Hawaii. We spent a week on Oahu, staying about 30 minutes outside Honolulu, and exploring many parts of the island.

I am happy to report that we were able to pack for 7 people for a week in carry-on only luggage. This was possible because I combined the little boys’ things into one rolling bag (their clothes are smaller!), which meant that we had an allowance of an extra bag for our diving and snorkel gear. Plus, with a low of about 71 and a high of about 82 every day, we didn’t really need heavy clothes. We wore fleeces on the plane and that sufficed for an extra layer. I actually wound up with an extra outfit I never wore! We were able to fly back with only carry-ons too, but we had to mail two crafts (slightly larger wooden surf boards) that the 5-year-old made in the kids’ club because the kids’ club warned me that TSA would confiscate them.

Anyway, we left the house at 6 am Saturday morning, with me being the last out the door to make sure things were set up for the Easter bunny to come, if you get my drift. It was an uneventful if rainy drive to Newark airport (it was about 35 degrees — the northeast was not really making it had to leave…). We went through the usual rigamarole of getting 7 of us through security, and then we boarded our direct EWR to Honolulu flight. Yep, there is a direct flight! Not having to deal with a layover makes the trip a lot more doable.

That said, the flight was…long. There is no getting around this. It is a long way from New Jersey to Honolulu! However, they built more time into the itinerary for getting to take-off than we needed, so I was delighted to see that instead of 11 hours, the flight was only 10 hours. Still, 10 hours is a lot of time to be in an airplane, especially for a during-the-day flight. The older kids were fine but the 5-year-old needed active management. He was cranky about being up at 5:30 a.m. Fortunately, just about when I wasn’t sure how we were going to make it, he fell asleep on me at approximately T-5 hours. Then he slept until T-2.5 hours. I couldn’t move, but he was quiet. I watched this BBC Asia documentary. Then he woke up and we watched together for 30 minutes and then it was my husband’s turn to sit with him again and I got to read for the rest of the flight.

We picked up our minivan and drove to a restaurant (Beach House) along the beach (naturally) to have “lunch” (it was 8 p.m. for us) and to kill some time until we could check in at Aulani. The ocean was so pretty, and the temperature so lovely that it was definitely a nice welcome to Hawaii moment.

Longtime readers will recall that Aulani was the same resort we stayed during spring break 2017. (Trip down memory lane to reread that post!) It’s managed by Disney, and it really is a good place for kids, with water slides, a lazy river, a splash playground, multiple pools (including some kid-friendly hot tubs), and a beach. Plus character dining, a kids club, and lots of Disney movies on TV.

Unfortunately, it being a Disney property, apparently you are supposed to reserve everything ahead of time (like 30-45 days) which I must have forgotten. I didn’t get any communication from the resort reminding me, so we showed up to find that just about everything was booked in the app. However, there were some cancelations, so we managed to grab a few things — 3 mornings in the kids’ club for the 5-year-old, and a date night dinner in the nice restaurant for my husband and me. They also have space for a few standby guests, so we did character dining one morning for breakfast with all 7 of us by showing up early (hey, we were jet-lagged anyway) and then a second morning for a smaller crew.

Since we had the minivan, we also did a lot of stuff off the resort. On Sunday (after our breakfast with Mickey) we went to the Dole Plantation. This was as much to see the interior of the island for a bit as anything else, and some nostalgia for our trip 8 years ago, but we took the little train ride around, walked through the gardens, got Dole Whip, and some kids went in the maze. Then for dinner we got pizza for the kids and my husband and I went out for our 4-course meal. This was a definite difference from 8 years ago — we could easily leave the big kids in charge of the little ones. 8 years ago the oldest was 9 so we couldn’t leave any of them alone for more than a few minutes.

On Monday we split the crew because my husband was taking the 15-year-old and the 10-year-old diving. The 10-year-old did his check out dives this week and got certified! The 15-year-old also did his required dives to get his advanced certification. I suspect my husband will be angling to take the two of them on a multi-day dive boat trip one of these days. I may have had a very short Scuba career (as people who listened to the “Never Have I Ever” episode of BOBW will recall) but at least I gave birth to two scuba diving buddies.

The 17-year-old and 13-year-old have no interest in diving, but they did go in the Aulani snorkel pool (stocked with fish) a few times.

Monday night, since we didn’t have any resort reservations, we ventured off campus and wound up across the street, where there are a couple of good places. We ate at Monkeypod Kitchen and really liked it — wound up going back there again, plus to this place called 808 Craft House and a Mexican restaurant as well.

The week more or less continued like this, with a few variations. Wednesday I’d had a rough morning with the 5-year-old, so when my husband got back from diving, he took everyone to go snorkel in Shark’s Cove, and then they went to visit his cousin’s son, who works at a banana farm growing different varieties of bananas. They got to see the banana farm, and then they had dinner. I went on a lovely 5-mile run along the beach, read on the beach, and then ate dinner on my balcony solo. I needed this mid-week break!

Then Thursday we went to Hanauma Bay State Park. We had logged on to the reservation system precisely at 7 a.m. 48 hours before, and were able to get tickets, so we showed up for our 1 p.m. booking and snorkeled. The reefs had a lot of fish and while it was cold, most of the kids enjoyed it (I got cold and got out after 15 minutes…). I took lots of photos of the mountains, and we drove around the island a bit to avoid traffic, seeing the gorgeous coast line. Oahu is just amazing with its folded green mountains, the crashing surf, the farm land.

However, just as we were thinking we should quit our jobs and move we encountered… the traffic. Oh my goodness. Despite our detour, we wound up in one of the worst traffic jams I have ever been in. We inched forward, moving about 100 yards in 30 minutes. It took us over 2.5 hours to get back from the bay (despite it taking us less than an hour to get there!). So that pretty much took the entire day.

Then there was Friday. Many months before, the 17-year-old had asked if we could do a tour that involved a “cage dive” (more a cage snorkel, actually) with sharks. Hawaii has a lot of sharks, and this tour promised that you would see them up close. He had asked during my “Yes Quest” (three weeks where I was trying to say “yes” to more interesting things) so I said yes and bought the tickets for the two of us (no one else took us up on the option!). I can’t say I was really looking forward to this — not so much the sharks (you’re in a cage) as I really don’t like boats, I don’t like rocky water that makes me seasick, or being cold, as I often am while snorkeling.

But my son really wanted to, so I drove us to the North Shore early Friday morning and we checked in for the 9:30 a.m. boat. We went about 20 minutes out over choppy waves to a spot where fishermen can use longlines, and so there are always a lot of sharks. They had us climb into this cage that was roped to the side of the boat. We hung on to the sides. Meanwhile, as we were climbing in, you could see fins all over the place!

It was definitely an experience. I have never been that close (in open water) to sharks before. They were mostly Galapagos sharks, and we were so close that you could touch them (of course we wouldn’t! But they were brushing right past us.). Dozens of them swam around the cage, looking at us as we looked at them. By the end of our time in the cage I was starting to recognize features on a few of the more curious ones. Wow!

That said, the whole thing was pretty uncomfortable, bouncing up and down on the waves, and then at the end several of us got stung by something — probably sea lice, the captain said. We got pulled back in the cage, moored to the boat, and treated with spray.

I was glad to have done it, but also glad to be done with it. However, then on the way back we got something of a bonus — a whale sighting! Two whales in fact. The crew spotted the blow holes and told us to look and so for about 20 minutes we followed them, staying a respectful distance, and watching them surface over and over again. The crew said now was a really bad time for whale watching — most had moved away by this point — so we just got lucky. I drove back in a thunderstorm but hey.

Saturday we got up and had our last family breakfast. I really enjoyed having a lot of meals with the 7 of us this week. I won’t claim the little two guys were particularly “good” (or adventurous with food) but we sat together many times, something it has become increasingly hard to do as the older kids have their own stuff. After breakfast we spent an hour on the beach, packed up, got lunch at Monkeypod and went to the airport.

As tends to be the case, the flight east was significantly shorter than the flight west. We had also used miles to upgrade (as I noted in my 2017 Aulani post, this is the one upside of my husband’s frequent work travel). So theoretically it would be possible to sleep on this red-eye — 2:50 p.m. Honolulu time to 6:30 a.m. Newark time, which is only 12:30 a.m. Honolulu time. Short night.

And it turned out to be really short because I never slept at all. I sat across from the 5-year-old, but while usually the upside of a business class seat is that you are far away from your fellow passengers, this was not an upside for my 5-year-old on a red-eye. Or at least this particular 5-year-old! My notes from 2017 say my daughter, who was then 5, slept for 6 hours on the return flight! Sigh. I was up and down out of my seat dozens of times during that flight. When he got fussy he really wanted to sleep on me, as he had on the way to Hawaii, but of course that didn’t work. I kind of crouched next to him for a bit and then had to go back to my seat and he actually howled for a bit. He did sleep for the last 3.5 hours of the flight, but as soon as I was sure he was out, and tried to go to sleep myself we hit…the turbulence from hell.

I think there were thunderstorms over the midwest, because not only were we bouncing, the plane was visibly swaying back and forth. That calmed after 15 minutes or so but we still were bouncing randomly enough that the rest of the flight was quite uncomfortable. So I didn’t manage to fall asleep. At least my husband did, as he was the one driving us the 90 minutes home from Newark.

So…how to describe the trip? I am a bit soured on air travel right now, but as I have learned with family travel, it is best not to describe a trip as good or bad. My goal was to have a few enjoyable moments, and this trip definitely had that. Oahu is so gorgeous, and the weather was amazing. We had some great family times.

There were definitely low points, beyond the long flights. We had a two bedroom villa, which theoretically should have been fine as there was a sofa bed and a chair bed in the living room, but there was still drama around sleeping, and who snores too loudly to be around anyone else and so forth. One night in particular, the 5-year-old insisted on sleeping in my bed (after being put back in his bed twice), so after he fell asleep I got up and went to sleep with the 13-year-old, who proceeded to kick me awake every 5 minutes for about 45 minutes until I got exasperated and built myself a bed on the floor out of sofa cushions. I found a pillow for my head but to keep warm I wound up using my 17-year-old’s coat, which was lying on the floor. As I was trying to sleep on the floor with a coat as a blanket, it did not help to think about what I was paying for the privilege.

I wound up resolving this situation by building a similar bed for the 5-year-old out of sofa cushions on the floor of my husband and my room. This made for a slightly less romantic resort experience, but at least the 5-year-old stopped waking us up in the middle of the night.

The long flights were also hard but the good news about having survived such long flights is that I now feel like short flights are nothing. Why did I think the flight to Salt Lake City was so long?? Well, I know — it was because the 5-year-old was yelling on that one too. But 4.5 hours definitely seems doable at this point!

Anyway, I’m glad we went and glad to have the memories. Also I’m glad a few moments are just memories now, but there were some wonderful times as well. Always a mix. And I saw sharks!

I’ll post some more pictures from the week at Instagram at some point (@lvanderkam).