Hawaii, Day 1: The Resort

Home sweet home. Sigh. I close my eyes and I see a patch of green and blue ocean framed with black lava rocks and a blue sky with a few lazy white clouds floating around. This Hawaiian getaway has easily jumped into my "Number One Vacation of All Time" spot, and we've had some good vacations. Everything about it was completely perfect and I'm still a little mind-boggled about some of the things we saw and did! One thing perfect about it was its length. To be home and hug the girls and hear about their super fun time with Grandpa and Grandma is exactly what I want to be doing today. How to blog this week, though! How to share it? How to record these memories! It's daunting. I decided I'll write one post for each day and probably write one a day so as to not overwhelm. Some will be longer than others, but each entry, because each day, in this Hawaii journal will be spectacular, I promise!

. Obviously, day one included our flight out. Fun on this day was running into good friends Sara and Arend at the airport! (They snapped the picture.) What an exciting time to connect. Not fun on this day was the 2 hour delay we waited while mechanics fixed the hydraulics on our plane. I didn't care about the wait, I was sans kids and had a 500 page book and ipod I'd been dreaming about spending time with. I did care about flying an apparently broken airplane 5 hours across the Pacific Ocean. All was fine, however.

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We picked up our rental car and some groceries and checked into our hotel-- the Kaanapali Shores. This hotel went waaaay above my expectations. Our ocean view condo with full kitchen, living room and lanai was awesome! The grounds were tropically landscaped, the beach was steps away, the 2 pools and hot tubs were refreshing. We even found a bottle of wine in our condo as a congrats for our anniversary. We would completely recommend this place to anyone looking for a beautiful but reasonable place to stay in Maui.


Part of our package was $100 to spend in the resort's ocean front restaurant. We ate a gourmet meal, watched the sun set (this picture is taken from and shows the view from our lanai) and headed off to bed early. Day one was perfect.