Back to Hawaii!

Whew! Our clients have been keeping us busy lately! THANK YOU! As always, we appreciate the support of our friends and family and we truly enjoy helping people plan memorable vacations.

We finally have a moment to share some of our photos from our latest trip to Oahu and the Big Island of Hawaii last month. Since Oahu is such a popular island to visit, we figured it was finally time for us to check it out for ourselves and see what the fuss is about! Now, some people have told us Oahu is not their favorite island out of all the islands of Hawaii, but we absolutely fell in love with it. It’s understandable that people may be disappointed when they realize that Honolulu is a large city with major traffic (and traffic is NO JOKE there!), while expecting to spend their time on a sandy beach on a quiet island. However, if you get outside of the city, there are many incredible, quiet places to visit with jaw-dropping views. On our first day on Oahu, we slept in to recover from our long day of travel the day before, and decided to make it an easy day of driving up to the North Shore to see what we could see. We started out from Ewa Beach where we were staying, and drove on the west side of the island on the Farrington Hwy.

We stopped for lunch at a place called Farm to Barn on the Kamehameha Hwy. Here they serve fresh food and juices with ingredients sourced right there on their farm. Jeff had a local dish called Loco Moco (rice, hamburger, and egg smothered in gravy), which is his new favorite dish, and Marianne had a fantastic vegan poke bowl made with beets. This was definitely one the best meals of our trip!

Farm to Barn restaurant, Loco Moco, and the vegan poke bowl.

Along the way to the little town of Haleiwa we stopped Laniakea Beach, a popular turtle-spotting spot. Unfortunately, the turtles had better things to do that day and we didn't get to see any, but we had a nice time people-watching and listening to the waves hit the rocky shore.

Laniakea Beach

Next we headed to the Banzai Pipeline in hopes of seeing a surfing competition. During the winter the waves on the North Shore make for ideal surfing conditions, and this is when all the big surfing competitions happen. Unfortunately, there were no competitions going on when we got there, but we were able to spend some time on the beach watching quite a few surfers riding the waves.

Banzai Pipeline

Finally we made it to Haleiwa. Haleiwa is a cute little popular town with lots of galleries, restaurants, and shopping. We stopped at Matsumoto Shave Ice to see if their shave ice was worth the hype (shave ice on the islands is a very competitive thing!). The consensus is that Matsumoto is Jeff’s favorite, but Marianne prefers another place on the Big Island… so far. We also stopped at one of the many shrimp trucks for Jeff to get some garlic shrimp, but what he had was just so/so, and so we’ll have to find more for him to try!

Making shave ice at Matsumoto's

At one point we got turned around and ended up on this beautiful tree-lined street.

On the drive back we took the Kamehameha Hwy. through the interior of the island which took us by the Dole Planation (we did not stop, but don’t worry, we got some Dole Whip the next day!) and the Green World Coffee Farm. Along the way were several small Hawaiian towns, lush macadamia nut fields, pine forests, and beautiful views of the surrounding mountains. When we got back to our vacation rental, we had just enough time to walk down to the beach to watch the sunset.

Watching the sunset from Ewa Beach

There were so many more things we could have done on the North Shore but didn’t have enough time. However, this was a wonderful first day of island exploration! Aloha for now! 🤙🌺🏄