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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
So we’ve been in Hawaii for about a week, traipsing around Oahu to literally every corner of this island. Tomorrow we’re heading for Maui, and in a week we start the journey home. Oahu is great, and I’ll try to put together a post with more details on what we’ve been up to while we’re on Maui, where we should have a little more down time. This post is going to be dedicated to talking about a sidequest I had…
Well, it’s official. I’m now a member of the 50-state club. A journey that started on a whim, almost 12 years ago when I had a free summer and decided to try and see as much of America as possible finally reached its conclusion when we landed in Hawaii. It’s… a really odd feeling actually. I’m obviously really happy and excited to have reached this point. It’s been almost five years since I was within striking distance, but then fatherhood…