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Author: liran

We Made It To Iceland

We Made It To Iceland

You’ll notice the title does not include the exclamation point I would normally include… Let’s just get right to it – we’re really excited and happy to be here, but man getting here was a classic “not a pony ride in May-sunshine” experience. Our saga started sitting in above-average Belt Parkway traffic on the way to JFK. After getting through security, which for some reason closed the TSA Pre check-in line at 7:30 pm (is this a thing at JFK???),…

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Find Your Own Rivendell

Find Your Own Rivendell

When traveling, especially on a long journey, finding an inviting, comfortable, and safe place to get some rest is critical. During the pandemic, when we weren’t traveling as much, it was still important to search for places of refuge from the mundanity and quiet but omnipresent low level anxiety of virus-driven daily life. Regardless of the circumstance, finding an oasis of peace and rest amongst the chaos can go a long way towards restoring both mental and physical stamina. In…

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On Adventure Traveling: Family Edition

On Adventure Traveling: Family Edition

Sitting here now over a month after being home from our epic Hawaii trip, I can’t help but feel a bit of the same melancholy I felt five years ago at the end of our New Zealand trip, as there were quite a few parallels between coming home from that trip and this one. Both involved really rather epic travel itineraries that included long, overnight layovers in California. Both involved a lot of moving around, in a way Ariel and…

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On Being Home 2: Covid Edition

On Being Home 2: Covid Edition

Well it’s been just about a month since we got home from our epic family adventure to Hawaii. Even though it’s been a while since I stood on the side of the Piilani Highway, feeling like we had reached a new pinnacle in our adventuring career, I’m sitting here at my office staring out at the steady thrum of cars and trucks motoring along the New Jersey Turnpike, with a strange feeling of unreality. In a lot of ways, it…

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Making Our Way Around Maui With A 4 Year Old: Baby Beach, Dragon’s Teeth, A Luau, And A Maui Road You Should Actually Stay Away From

Making Our Way Around Maui With A 4 Year Old: Baby Beach, Dragon’s Teeth, A Luau, And A Maui Road You Should Actually Stay Away From

So after a week of exploring Maui with our son and my dad, I thought I would summarize what we did, because a lot of it isn’t really what families with young children do when they go to Hawaii. In fact, few families even go to Maui, as it’s generally seen as a honeymoon/romantic type of destination. But we actually found there was a ton of stuff to do, even with a 4 year old! We stayed Lahaina, near the…

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Haleakala National Park In Maui With A 4 Year Old: A Review

Haleakala National Park In Maui With A 4 Year Old: A Review

One of the things I was most looking forward to during our Hawaii trip was taking a drive up to the top of Haleakala National Park. I was excited to visit one of the most remote national parks in the entire system, and the pictures I had seen made it look like a far easier version of our somewhat ill-fated attempt to “simply walk into Mordor” aka the Tongariro Alpine crossing. The Red Crater really does look a lot like…

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Should You Drive The Piilani Highway aka The “Forbidden Road” After The Road To Hana?

Should You Drive The Piilani Highway aka The “Forbidden Road” After The Road To Hana?

This is Part 2 of a series on The Road to Hana and the “Forbidden Road” aka the Piilani Highway aka “the back road” to Haleakala. If you’d like to read about our experiences heading towards Hana, check out Part 1 by clicking here. The Piilani Highway has a legendarily bad reputation due to a sometimes literally lethal combination of really rough road patches, blind turns (some with cliff walls on one side and cliff drops into the Pacific ocean…

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The Road to Hana and the Piilani Highway (aka the “Forbidden” Road)

The Road to Hana and the Piilani Highway (aka the “Forbidden” Road)

So I wrote this right after we got back from a rather epic driving day. After leaving the house at 8 am in the morning heading east via the Hana Highway, we staggered back at about 7 pm after heading west on the Piilani Highway. In short, the trip was incredible. But you already knew that, right? The Road to Hana is one of the best-known drives in the entire world. Nicknamed “the Divorce Highway” because of all the supposed…

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Exploring Oahu With A 4 Year Old: The Polynesian Cultural Center, Lanai Lookout, Kailua Beach, And A Diamondhead Fail

Exploring Oahu With A 4 Year Old: The Polynesian Cultural Center, Lanai Lookout, Kailua Beach, And A Diamondhead Fail

The second half of our Oahu adventure (aside from LOST film site searches, which I already talked about), included our very first Hawaiian luau, and an exploration of the east coast of Oahu. For our luau experience, we went to the Polynesian Cultural Center in Laie. This effectively completed our Oahu island circuit, as we had previously been in this town during our trip to the sea turtle beach earlier in the week. The Polynesian Cultural Center is far more…

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Exploring Oahu With A 4 year old: Pearl Harbor, Dole Plantation, Haleiwa Beach, Sea Turtles, And More!

Exploring Oahu With A 4 year old: Pearl Harbor, Dole Plantation, Haleiwa Beach, Sea Turtles, And More!

So now that we’ve been all over Oahu with our 4 year old, we can definitively answer the question of whether or not you can enjoy Hawaii with a small child. The answer – at least for us – was a definitive yes. I’ll break down the highlights of we did, what worked, and what didn’t (spoiler it was all mostly awesome) work. It’s a lot – so I’ll be doing two posts on on this. One of my top…

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