Over the last few days we’ve had a real mix of long, difficult hiking and chill out time by the pool or at happy hour. Ha’ena State Park and Hanakāpī’ai Waterfall On Sunday we went to Ha’ena state park which is on the North shore of the island, and requires you to get a shuttle bus from a park and ride area just to get there. Because the shuttle is booked in advance and it’s a very popular place to…
We took a helicopter tour around the island and it was AMAZING! I’m not going to lie, I was slightly nervous about the trip having never been in a helicopter before, but a few minutes in those worries slipped away (we had a great female pilot) as I was swept away into the beautiful scenery and breath-taking views that you just wouldn’t get from anywhere else. We took the “Grand Skies Island Tour” which is a 55 minute tour around the…
Today we decided to get up early at around 6.45am to go and watch the sunrise from our local beach. It was a bit of an early start but worth it, right opposite our Airbnb so we quickly grabbed our beach chairs and walked over after the alarm went off. That same day we had booked on to one of Hawaii’s most popular excursions, a “mounting tubing” trip which takes you down a former irrigation system of the Līhuʻe Plantation….
Today we travelled to our second Hawaiian island – Kauai (nicknamed the “Garden Isle” because of how lush and green it is) and my first impression of the island was how different it was to Oahu. This is the picture of what Hawaii looked like in my head before coming here – very much a tropical island. Anyway more on this later… Let’s go back to the flight from Oahu to Kauai. It took all of 21 minutes. After take off,…
On a bit of an overcast day, we went out to see Pearl Harbor which is, surprisingly for America, a free National Park site. They had a series of museums there talking about the attacks and subsequent war with Japan, and various monuments and memorials. The most busy and poignant monument required a short boat ride out to the USS Arizona (we had to pre-book a ticket for this), which remains sunk at the bottom of the harbor and now…
We are slowly getting used to the hot weather and masses of people, although I’m not going to lie the hike we did yesterday was very busy and I found myself longing for the quiet nature of the National parks, where seldom did you see anyone. The hike we did today was recommended in our guidebook and was named Diamond Head Crater Trail. You have to book a permit to be able to do it (at no cost) which seemed…
On our second full day on Oahu we took a guided tour around the island, which was a good way to see a lot more of the area and loads of the highlights when we don’t have a rental car here. The tour was only a small group of 7 of us, and it lasted around 8 hours total, picking us up near our Airbnb and then circling the island. Here’s various pics from the stops we made: Sunrise on…
In case you haven’t seen it yet, we wrapped up our time in the National Parks by writing a post covering our “best highlights” – check that out here if you want to see what we each thought in various categories. After an early morning start in LA we flew the “short” trip between nearby US states to get to Hawaii – it only took 5hr30 on the plane here 🙂 We arrived in Hawaii at around 1pm local time,…
Having finished up the National Parks leg of our trip we are now in Hawaii, but before we start bombarding you all with photos from here we thought it might be fun (maybe even interesting to some people!) to each do a round-up of our highlights so far, without conferring. We decided on a few different categories which are below. Si’s picks Favourite Park I think overall my favourite park was Bryce Canyon. It wasn’t the biggest in terms of…
We have just checked into the Hilton hotel, which is next door to the airport in LA where we are flying to Hawaii from in the morning. Here is a quick run down of our last few days in Joshua Tree. We had two full days in Joshua Tree and both were spent walking in the National Park. The Park is huge and lies between the Colorado and Mojave deserts. The first day we did a hike in the western…