Hi everyone, the blog is back! 🙂 We’ve just set off on our long 2 month trip around Canada and flew in to Vancouver on Monday. The airports at both ends were easy and quiet which was nice, and the flight was on time and “modest” at around 9hr30. After waking up quite early due to the jet lag, we spent the first full day in Vancouver doing a lot of walking around the city. We are staying in an…
We’ve had 4 days in L.A. now since landing back on the mainland, and it’s been pretty busy. We didn’t do much on our first day other than wake up late because we were now 3 hours ahead of Hawaiian time, pick up our rental car and then go to do a bit of shopping since the weather was pretty rubbish. Griffith Observatory and Philippe’s The crappy weather continued in to our second day, as it was pretty rainy and…
We did this at the end of our National Parks leg of our trip and we thought it might be fun to do the same now that we’ve finished our Hawaii leg too. We have each done a round-up of our highlights without conferring, and based on a few different categories which are below. Si’s Picks Best island I’m going to go with Maui for the best island, which was the fourth and final island we visited. This was the…
We set off quite early at around 7.30am this morning to drive the 1hr30 to the top of Haleakala, the extinct volcano that forms the vast majority of the island of Maui. This felt like a bit of a return to our hiking days round the west coast National Parks in Utah and Arizona as by the time we’d reached the 10,023 foot summit, it was much colder, windier and wetter than it was down at sea level where we…
Sorry for the lack of blog posts the last few days, we’ve had a couple of long days visiting the East coast of the Big Island, which is about 2 hours drive or so away from where we are staying on the West coast. This island definitely feels a lot bigger than the others we’ve been to before! Volcanoes National Park On Sunday we set off early at about 6.30am to get over to the East coast to visit the…
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…
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….
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…
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,…