Evan wake-up tracker – 2am (some improvement).
The Hodgson family was up and packing at 4am. Today is probably the most aggressive day events wise. We’ve got surfing lessons in the morning and then need to get to the airport to catch a flight to Oahu. We repacked everything back in suitcases, grabbed a change of clothes for after surfing and hit the road. We actually left ahead of scheduled 6:30 departure, which is HIGHLY unusual in the Hodgson household – think they were excited?
Will definitely miss this place – great place to stay if you’re in Maui and don’t mind using the Hawaiian trade winds as your air conditioner.
We grabbed a very quick breakfast at Kihei Caffe Lahaina. I got a take on a traditional Hawaiian meal – the Moco Loco with kalua pork, which is basically rice, pork, an over-medium egg with brown gravy. Not bad – very hardy meal to power up for the long day. There were 20 nene’s that were watching us eat on the patio. As soon as we
By the way – we’ve been very pleased so far with the chevy malibu – having a car with android auto is very nice when you’re driving all over.
We left there and continued the drive south east. My alarm went off at 6:50am to try to book the Hanauma bay reservations again, and quickly pulled over so Noelle could drive and I could book them. Of course, right as 7am hits the 5G internet on my phone that had been consistently good across the whole island went dark and I missed booking the reservations by like 20 seconds before sell out. I had 4 in my cart twice, but couldn’t close the deal before it sold out! 1 star to the Hanauma bay booking system. Oh well – that’s probably a sign. I fully expect a fleet of sharks to descend on the bay over next 2 days.
Another 45 minutes of driving and we arrive at Kihei, a cute little town on the lower west side of the island. We are signed up to have surf lessons at a place called “Surf Shack”. Arrived right on time for check-in. We lotioned up, dropped our stuff off in the bins, and put on little booties to protect our footsies for the coral. The people there tried to get me to leave the gopro camera I brought since people lose them all the time. Yeah right – you just want me to buy the photos – nice try suckers! Our instructor was named Mikey – nice guy, very talkative. He taught us how to lift the boards – one person in the front, one in back, get in between them and lift. Noelle and I had one set, the girls had their boards.
We had a quick 20 minute tutorial on safety, etiquette, and technique for getting up onto the board then headed over to the beach with our boards.
We waded out to the middle of where the waves were starting to crash. Water was fairly shadow – maybe waist deep in most place. The waves were really great that day according to the instructor. There were quite a few people out surfing, but it didn’t feel crowded at all.
The first time, Mikey helped us all out, getting us ready, giving instructions on when to paddle slow, when to paddle fast, and when to get up (knees, leg up, pivot, eyes forward) and gave us a nice big push to get perfectly on the wave. Victoria started to get a little scared of the waves and had a little bit of a panic attack, but Mikey did great to calm her down. All 4 of us got up the first time. It was actually much easier than I thought it would be with the very buoyant foam boards we were on. I was so proud of the girls, especially Victoria for getting over her fears and shredding those waves like they were born for it.
After a few rounds of getting pushed, we started to get the hang over it and started to paddle ourselves and catch waves on our own. Lydia even started to do tricks, jumping around and riding the surfboard backwards.
The instructor told us that it was very unusual for kids that young to do that well on the first time – probably says that to everyone to get a good tip (and it worked). Time flew and in about an hour we had to head out.
There was one really annoying thing about the surf trip though – if you notice in some of the pictures below I had a gopro attached to my pants in a floating go-pro case. I used it to get all kinds of amazing videos of the kids catching waves and surfing right by me. When we were down to the last couple waves before we had to go in, I wanted one perfect video of myself catching a wave from behind. I moved the camera to my wrist, saw an epic wave coming, started paddling with the camera in my hand, and felt the camera (that was attached with one of those go-pro handscrews) go flying off the top of that float stick, leaving me with just the stick. I tried to look around a bit for it, but it was hopeless with the waves crashing around. It was older, but the thing that hurts is losing that footage. Oh well, I was warned – I’ll definitely need to buy the photos now. I’ll try to get more videos of surfing later.
We surfed the last wave in and waded over to the shallows where we wrapped up our ankle ropes around the boards and picked them back up and walked them out. We were able to hose off with fresh water in a hose by the shore, which should be our showers before the airplane ride. We got our stuff and jumped in the car.
I had felt pretty confident that we had enough time to make it to the airport early, so we stopped by chick-fil-a for lunch and to let the girls change out of their swimsuits. The chick-fil-a was delicious, but took forever. Then we had to stop and get gas, and there was a massive line that took forever. All of a sudden I started to stress a bit since we had eaten away all of our buffer time.
I shouldn’t have worried as we were able to drop off the rental very quickly and made it through security in like 20 minutes. They didn’t make you take anything about of your bags or take shoes off which drastically reduced the time to go through (take note Hartsfield-Jackson). The flight was also delayed 30 minutes so we got to relax for a bit at the airport.
We flew Hawaiian airlines, on a flight that took a very quick 45 minutes. They serve you some kind of delicious Hawaiian juice right after take-off. We landed in the Honolulu airport which was beautiful, but massive compared to the Maui airport.
We grabbed a fresh rental from the Honolulu enterprise – another chevy malibu, this one with a sunroof, and headed east towards our hotel close to Waikiki beach. Oahu feels much more like a big city – 6 lane highways, bad traffic, everything a little dirtier and graffiti, but still beautiful once you get to the better spots.
We tried to guess which of the skyscrapers we were going to be staying in (we were all wrong). I found the place, parked out front so I could grab the parking pass from the hotel, parked i n the garage and we took the elevator up to the 34th floor for this view:
At this point, we were a little starved, so we went downstairs and did a short walk a few blocks to a nice little area with 3 different food trucks with picnic tables. I got a Spicy Mayo Ahi Poke bowl from “Five Star Poke“, the kids got hot dogs from “Hula Dog Kulio“, and Noelle got some kind of fried shrimp hot dog from the 3rd truck that i’ve forgotten the name of. My poke bowl was definitely 5 star awesome. Noelle thought hers was ok. The girls ate theirs, but weren’t blown away. They were more excited to watch the Nene’s swoop in and start picking on the bread leftovers.
After dinner, we walked down a couple blocks for an evening beach trip at Waikiki beach. We packed a large sand-proof beach blanket, found an empty spot and spread it out. Since it was later in the day, the crowds had definitely died down, and had a much more chill vibe than I was expecting. There were several people around us sharing some marijuana which may have been contributing to the relaxing vibe. There were still a ton of people out surfing the waves, and the the kids played in the sand and water. The area were at was a man-made lagoon with a protective wall so really no waves / rip currents to be worried about. I was beat from the day and being up so early and passed out on the blanket.
We watched a beautiful sunset while Victoria buried Lydia, waiting for a firework show that happens every friday night. At 7:45, with the sun down below the horizon, the firework show began. Unfortunately, a building was blocking 90% of the view of the show (which was fairly short anyway). That was ok, our day had plenty of fireworks already and we packed it up and marched back to the house. We did grab some Royal Kona coffee, milk, and sugar (it seems like creamer must be against the law here – went 3 different places and no-one had it) from one of the 100’s of ABC grocery stores that were all over the place. I went to sleep dreaming of having coffee in the morning with a view of diamond head in the morning.
