Aloha!

We have arrived home from our most relaxing and fabulous trip to Hawaii.  I thought I would give a quick preview of day 1 so that it will keep me going on the rest of the posts.  I will warn you that most of the pictures are of just the beautiful scenery and that my camera and my camera skills struggle to even remotely capture the beauty of what we saw.

 

We were off on a 15 hour day of travel getting up at 4 A.M. and LOVING every second of it.  It is amazing how wonderful simple things like driving in a car or flying on a plane can be as just 2 adults sans 5 kiddos.  We were in heaven! 

We arrived at the Turtle Bay Resort very tired that evening but were thrilled at the beauty of where we stayed.  We originally had booked a hotel right in downtown Honolulu but switched to this hotel on the opposite side of  the island and boy am I glad we did. 

 

Honolulu is a big busy city and felt nothing like what I wanted Hawaii to feel like.  The north shore however was far less busy and it was beautiful and tropical and everything we were hoping for.  A little bit longer of a drive, but well worth every scenic second.  Plus, we rented a convertible so we put the top down and just sucked in huge deep breaths of clean beautiful Hawaiian air. 

Ahhhhh...relaxation here we come!

 This was our resort and below is the view from our room.  We slept with our balcony doors open the two nights we were there and fell asleep and awoke to the sounds of waves breaking on the beach.  This hotel is as close to the water as you can get.  In fact, due to changes in building codes if this hotel were to be built today it could never be built as close to the water as it is. 

Going to this resort is awesome because you just walk right in.  No doors, no turnstile thingys....it is just all open to nature.  I can't even imagine living somewhere that it is so nice all year round that you don't even need a door!

Because of the time change we were pretty much up by 4 A.M. every morning.  I think the latest we slept was until 6:30 and one day we were even up and at it at 2:30 in the morning.  Don't worry, there were plenty of pool side naps and early bedtimes each  night.  We watched the sunrise each day and it was wonderful.

 

 

Here we are early morning on our first day of vacation watching the sun come up.  The moon and the stars were still out when we got to the beach. 

 

 

The rest of the shots are just from our sunrise that day.  There are many more of these to come.  I am missing it all already!