I love Hawaii!

I went to Hawaii as part of my vacation fest at the beginning of September. It was beautiful! This was my first trip to Hawaii and I don't know how many times I said, "I could totally move here!" It's just my style! Here's what I loved about Hawaii!

• Plate lunches: We arrived on Wednesday around lunchtime, so our first stop was LocoMoco, a fast food place that serves the plate lunches I had been teased about for a month before going to Hawaii. Plate lunches are the staple Hawaiian fast food. It's some kind of meat with rice and mac salad. Here is my teriyaki beef plate lunch:

Teriyaki beef plate lunch

• Wearing flip flops (or "slippahs" as everyone there calls them!) to a wedding on the beach:

New slippahs

• Visiting with Ron's family who just took to me (and I to them) like white on rice! We played Karaoke Revolution, watched a couple really bad movies (Benchwarmers and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory), cooked dinner one night (that's a whole 'nother post!) and basically just had lots of fun together. Ron's sister is fabulous and her family is awesome. It made me want to adopt them!

After spending a few days with Ron's family, we headed over to Maui.

When I decided I'd go to Hawaii with Ron, I consulted 1,000 Places to See Before You Die by Patricia Schultz to see what exactly she recommended one see while in Hawaii. There were two activities that sounded fabulous and we did both of them!

The first one was seeing the sunrise at the top of Haleakala on Maui. We got up at 2:45 AM to get dressed, peel the blankets of our hotel beds and drive the hour and a half up the mountain. Once at the top, we slept for another hour or so and then got out to brave the 20+ mph winds! It was SO windy and freezing cold! According to our car, it was 42 degrees outside. Brrrrrr!! The cold wouldn't have been so bad. The wind was the kicker.
Ron at Haleakala
Steph - Freezing to death!

The sunrise was worth it. It was completely gorgeous, even though the clouds were blowing through due to all the wind! These pictures do not do it justice, but here are a few anyway! It was so cool! The top of the mountain is just over 10,000 ft. It looked like we were an island in a sea of clouds. Everyone starting cheering once the sun peeked over the horizon. I would love to do this again and then ride a bike down. You ride through three different zones on the mountain. It looked pretty cool!

Just after sunrise

Sea of clouds

On Saturday night, we went to Ron's friend's wedding that took place on the beach at sunset. She was really cool and her husband seemed super sweet too.

Ron with Kimmie

The food was wonderful and we had a really nice time. Here's a picture we took after the wedding at the beach.



On Sunday, we got up fairly early in order to get on the Road to Hana by 8 AM. It was well worth the whole day it took. All day, I kept saying, "Wow! Oh my!" It was stunningly beautiful. The Road to Hana was windy (I think the book says it has over 400 turns) and many times over the bridges, there is only one lane. There are all kinds of waterfalls that can't be seen from the road. You have to hike down into a small ravine or behind a bend to see them. It was gorgeous!!! The photo on the left is one of my favorite pictures I took on the day we drove the very curvy Road to Hana. The one on the right is the first waterfall we saw. I think we did this during a drier part of the year because some of the waterfalls weren't gushing with water.



Steph on the Maui coast

The book we used as our guide for where to stop along the Road to Hana was Maui Revealed: The Ultimate Guidebook. It gave us excellent recommendations. We also used it when choosing restaurants to try while we were in Maui. We loved Da Kitchen in Kihei which was recommended.

Overall, a very enjoyable trip. I made Ron go to only one open house, but the condos were way too expensive for me (over $1 million!). I'd love to buy a home there and be able to stop by whenever I wanted. That would be awesome!!

I posted a few more random pictures on my Flickr account, so if you want to see any other pics, just check that link out! I feel like I posted plenty here! This may be the longest post ever for me!