Oahu, Hawaii 2017 Trip: Day 0 and Day 1 - Travelling to Honolulu, Hawaii, exploring downtown Honolulu and Ala Moana Beach
Happy New Year everyone! I went on trip to Oahu, Hawaii during the winter holidays with my boyfriend. I will be making a blog post about the experiences and thoughts I had each day of my trip. In addition, I will providing some tips and advice if anyone is hoping to plan a trip to this island. I might even do a overall/final thoughts and advice blog post for Oahu, Hawaii. I hope these blog posts will be interesting or helpful to someone out there.
Day 0: Travelling from Prince George, BC, Canada to Honolulu, Oahu, Hawaii
To be honest, nothing really exciting happened during day since we were just travelling.
- Our first flight from Prince George to Vancouver was only late about 10-20 minutes. I was so worried that something would go wrong with the first leg of our flights, which would cause us to miss our next one. (We flew with Air Canada)
- Once landing in Vancouver, we went through the U.S customs/ TSA. Please note that if you're flying from Vancouver to the U.S, you basically go through U.S customs there and you don't have to do that once arriving in the U.S
- We had dinner at a place called Vino Volo in the US terminal of the Vancouver airport. I would honestly avoid this place. The food was mediocre, small portions and was pricey.
- At around 6:00 PM, our flight took off for Honolulu! We flew Air Canada Rouge for this flight. One thing we didn't realized was that there was no screens on the seats. Basically you have to use your tablet/phone to download the Air Canada Rouge app and watch tv, movies, music etc through that. We were able to use the wifi on the plane for that app once we took off.
- Please note that you do not get a meal with Air Canada even though it is a 6 hour flight.
- We landed in Honolulu at 10:00 pm local time. (Hawaii is 2 hours behind Vancouver time) Our plane landed on time, however another plane was in our gate due to mechanical issues. So we were on the plane for an extra 30 mins before we were able to get off.
- HNL airport is way bigger than we thought. We actually got lost to getting our baggage.
- After baggage claim, we went to Hertz car rentals to pick up our car for the trip. Yes we did rent a car for 10 days. I will probably discuss more about this in a later blog post since there pros and cons with a car.
- We drove to our airbnb, which we also got lost getting there. Honolulu has so many highways and traffic is busy. Thank god for GPS on our phones.
We were exhausted, so once we got to the airbnb we went to bed.
Day 1
We woke pretty early that day, our airbnb lets a lot of sunlight in but we were so excited to be in Hawaii.
Here was our view from our airbnb
Our airbnb was in a neighbourhood called Kaimuki which has a rustic vibe to it. Lots of shops and restaurants in this area. Our place was situated on a hill so we got some amazing views.
My boyfriend soon realized that he forgot his flip flops so we ventured down to downtown Honolulu to a Walmart to find him some. Afterwards, we walked around downtown for a bit and got really hungry. For breakfast we went to Scratch Kitchen and Meatery.
I ordered the cochan de lait egg benny and my boyfriend got the milk and cereal pancakes. In addition we ordered some iced coffees and got side bacon and sausage.
Sorry for only having one photo I didn't get very good photos of the pancakes or the other items.
The coffees and side dishes were really good, so I was so excited to try my eggs benny. My eggs benny had an egg, roasted pork, coleslow and deep fried green tomatoes ( I didn't know that was what it was when I ate it, had to look on the website) and a piece of toast. This is not a traditional eggs benedict, but it tasted good. The pork was tender and I liked the toast. However the overall flavour was kind of weird to be honest, I didn't like the deep friend green tomato. I don't think I would order this again. However the milk and cereal pancakes were delicious! The milk syrup they used wasn't too sweet and the pancakes were so fluffy.
If you decide to come here, definitely order the pancakes! They also have a lot of other items on the menu. However, this was a pricey brunch so if you have a strict budget keep this in mind.
After this, we decided to head home and get ready for the beach! We decided to head to the Ala Moana Beach Park.
Parking at this beach was actually pretty easy, we found parking spot right away.
Here are some photos from this beach
What I liked about this beach was that it wasn't crowded so we got a good amount of space. The sand has a lot of rocks but you can still go barefoot. The water was cold at first but you get used to it pretty soon. I felt like the water was pretty clean and had a great time in the water.
Afterwards we head over to the Ala Moana mall to get some shaved ice. When you're in Hawaii, shaved ice is a must! We went to Island Vintage Shaved Ice which I had heard good things about. I ordered the Pink Island shaved ice and my boyfriend got soft served ice cream with honeycomb and espresso.
Both items were so good! The shaved ice was fluffy and the flavours were refreshing. Also ice cream and espresso was actually a good mix! I highly recommend trying this place out if you are craving dessert.
For dinner we decided to stay close to our airbnb and went to Asuka Nabe + Shabu Shabu for hotpot. For those who don't know what hotpot is, it's pretty much hot boiling broth and you cook meats, veggies, noddles etc in it. This meal is great for cold winter nights. We ordered 2 sets to share, which had plenty of food. It was also super helpful to have the server explain to us how to order and how much food is in the sets. The food was amazing, we were both stuffed after this meal! I highly recommend trying out this place. Everything was super fresh and the service was great as well.
Day 1 was an expensive food day! Eating out in Hawaii is not cheap but there is a lot of cheaper alternatives which I will talk about in the future posts.
After dinner we went home and just chilled for the rest of the night since we were exhausted.
If you have any questions, feel free to leave a comment!
Vivian
Here was our view from our airbnb
Our airbnb was in a neighbourhood called Kaimuki which has a rustic vibe to it. Lots of shops and restaurants in this area. Our place was situated on a hill so we got some amazing views.
My boyfriend soon realized that he forgot his flip flops so we ventured down to downtown Honolulu to a Walmart to find him some. Afterwards, we walked around downtown for a bit and got really hungry. For breakfast we went to Scratch Kitchen and Meatery.
I ordered the cochan de lait egg benny and my boyfriend got the milk and cereal pancakes. In addition we ordered some iced coffees and got side bacon and sausage.
Sorry for only having one photo I didn't get very good photos of the pancakes or the other items.
The coffees and side dishes were really good, so I was so excited to try my eggs benny. My eggs benny had an egg, roasted pork, coleslow and deep fried green tomatoes ( I didn't know that was what it was when I ate it, had to look on the website) and a piece of toast. This is not a traditional eggs benedict, but it tasted good. The pork was tender and I liked the toast. However the overall flavour was kind of weird to be honest, I didn't like the deep friend green tomato. I don't think I would order this again. However the milk and cereal pancakes were delicious! The milk syrup they used wasn't too sweet and the pancakes were so fluffy.
If you decide to come here, definitely order the pancakes! They also have a lot of other items on the menu. However, this was a pricey brunch so if you have a strict budget keep this in mind.
After this, we decided to head home and get ready for the beach! We decided to head to the Ala Moana Beach Park.
Parking at this beach was actually pretty easy, we found parking spot right away.
Here are some photos from this beach
What I liked about this beach was that it wasn't crowded so we got a good amount of space. The sand has a lot of rocks but you can still go barefoot. The water was cold at first but you get used to it pretty soon. I felt like the water was pretty clean and had a great time in the water.
Afterwards we head over to the Ala Moana mall to get some shaved ice. When you're in Hawaii, shaved ice is a must! We went to Island Vintage Shaved Ice which I had heard good things about. I ordered the Pink Island shaved ice and my boyfriend got soft served ice cream with honeycomb and espresso.
Both items were so good! The shaved ice was fluffy and the flavours were refreshing. Also ice cream and espresso was actually a good mix! I highly recommend trying this place out if you are craving dessert.
For dinner we decided to stay close to our airbnb and went to Asuka Nabe + Shabu Shabu for hotpot. For those who don't know what hotpot is, it's pretty much hot boiling broth and you cook meats, veggies, noddles etc in it. This meal is great for cold winter nights. We ordered 2 sets to share, which had plenty of food. It was also super helpful to have the server explain to us how to order and how much food is in the sets. The food was amazing, we were both stuffed after this meal! I highly recommend trying out this place. Everything was super fresh and the service was great as well.
Day 1 was an expensive food day! Eating out in Hawaii is not cheap but there is a lot of cheaper alternatives which I will talk about in the future posts.
After dinner we went home and just chilled for the rest of the night since we were exhausted.
If you have any questions, feel free to leave a comment!
Vivian
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