Hawaiian Honeymoon

Saturday after our reception we stayed the night at the new Marriott in Flagstaff, we were so shocked to see it snowing outside just after we got checked into our room. We barely missed the huge snow storm for our outdoor reception, we were definitely lucky.

Sunday morning it was still snowing like crazy as we drove down to Phoenix. Jon's family was staying in town for the rest of the week to have Thanksgiving together so we spent a few hours with them before heading to the airport to get on our flight. 

A few hours later and we arrived to this...

Our flight didn't arrive in Hawaii until late that night, once we got checked in we wandered around the shops and restaurants at the resort. We found a pizza place to eat dinner so of course we had to get the Hawaiian pizza, it did not disappoint!

Our first breakfast in Hawaii, Jon got the omelett and I had french toast with macadamia nut ice cream on top. Mmmm! Our view of the ocean was also pretty fantastic.

Laying out on the beach all day. Nothing more relaxing after months of stress from planning a wedding.

Doing the typical tourist stuff on our way to find the famous "Puka Dog"for lunch.

Sweet Visor!

Yum!! We loved our Puka Dogs

These are Hawaiian style hot dogs. Instead of having a hot dog bun cut down the middle, these buns have holes where the hot dog sits inside. Then they have bunch of different tropical style relish's and sauces to go inside the bun instead of your typical ketchup, mustard and relish.

This was the view from our room at night

I'm enjoying food while Jon is enjoys a book.. Sounds about right. 

Another gorgeous view from our room 

One of the things we both wanted to do while in Hawaii was make sure we went to a Luau. Apparently we wanted to go pretty bad because we went to A LOT of work to get free tickets to one. The concierge at our resort told us we could get free tickets if we went to a 30 minute class and listened to their sales pitch about vacation rentals in the area. It sounded pretty simple, so we agreed and showed up to the "class" only to find out that it would just be Jon and I with a realtor sitting in a small office watching video's and listening to her try and sell us a vacation rental for thousands of dollars a month.

The awkwardness of this entire event wasn't only that we knew we were wasting her time but I'm pretty sure she knew we were wasting her time too. We were on our honeymoon, in our 20's and she knew we couldn't afford a vacation rental home. Half way through her sales speech she looks at Jon and says "Did I offend you? You seem to be annoyed with me and have a look on your face like I upset you." Things just continued to get more awkward by the second.  I think the look on Jon's face was more the fact that we were all wasting our time and the entire thing was ridiculous.

In the end we still got the free tickets, we went to the Luau and it was pretty horrible and so was the food, lesson learned. Next time we will just pay and go to a good luau.

On our last day we checked out of our hotel early, rented a car and drove to the other end of the island to do a session in the temple. The drive had incredible views, everything was SO green! We stayed in Honolulu all week which seemed a lot like Los Angeles or any big city but once we drive a few miles away toward the other end of the island we realized why everyone loves Hawaii so much, its beautiful! 

I've always made fun of Jon for being a reckless driver and making me car sick all the time. After all the winding roads to get the the other island I was completely car sick. I had the worst headache of all time and wanted so badly just to throw up and feel better. We finally pulled over at a park along the way, to see if some fresh air would help me feel better. As you can see this isn't your typical park, it was way prettier.

Trying to take pictures before we got back on the road again, still felt horrible. 

Once we got to the other end of the island we drove around BYU campus. It was fun to see everything in person that we have always heard so much about.

We stopped at the visitors center before heading in to do a session, one of the missionaries greeted us at the door and we mentioned to him we were visiting on our honeymoon and stopped to do a session before flying out that night.  He told us we were lucky we had come that day because the temple had just been re dedicated the day before after being closed for over a year to be remodeled and cleaned. We had no idea it was ever even closed, we were even more excited to do a session knowing we were one of the first few people to be inside after the re dedication.

Our rental car made me laugh every time I looked at it, definitely not our style of cars but fun to drive around for a day. 

Our next stop after our temple session was some "secret" spot that Jon knew about from when he went and stayed with his cousin years ago while she was going to BYU.

We hung around the Dole Plantation for a few hours to kill time before our flight,  I had no idea how huge this place was.

Of course we had to do the famous Pineapple Garden Maze. Basically a huge maze that you have to find your way out of. I'm still surprised we finished, it was not easy. Or maybe I should say that I'm surprised Jon finished. I lost focus and got bored after 20 minutes of trying to find our way out.

At least Jon kept me entertained during the whole maze

Finally finished! 

Nice work Honey!

I LOVE this picture!! This boy makes me smile.

Yes we are cool.

No we did not ride the train.

Next we headed to the mall to eat dinner and wander around before going to the airport. I was so caught up in wedding planning and our honeymoon that I forgot it was almost Christmas time.

Here is where things started to get a little crazy. So far our honeymoon had been just what we expected and hoped for. Everything turned out how it was supposed to and we enjoyed our 4 days vacationing, relaxing, and loving each other as a newly married couple. When we originally booked our flights we planned on flying home on a red eye flight and arriving back to Phoenix early Thanksgiving morning so we could spend it with family who was still in town from the wedding. Well, things did NOT go as planned.

Once we got boarded on the plane Jon and I immediately took a Dramamine to help us get some sleep on the overnight flight, bad idea! An hour and a half later both of us are drowsy as can be and realized we were still sitting on the runway and haven't even left yet. The pilot announces over head that we would have to get off the plane due to a broken parking brake. This was not one of those small airplanes, this one had hundreds and hundreds of angry people getting back off the plane at 2am. We were then told we needed to wait in line for our luggage to get brought back off the plane and wait in another long line to get hotel, food, and taxi vouchers for the night. After calling around to different airlines trying to find another flight to get on and get home our hopes were shattered when they told us we would have to stay another night or two before we could get on another flight home.

Typically we would have happily stayed in Hawaii an extra night or two but we were missing Thanksgiving with our families that we rarely see from out of town. Needless to say we were highly disappointed. We finally got checked into our hotel after waiting in line drowsy for almost 8 hours and got to bed around 7 the next morning.

Here is the view from our new location where we were "forced" to stay another night. Can't complain too much, we even had an ocean view.

After our long night we woke up disappointed that we weren't home eating a big Thanksgiving dinner with our family. We decided to venture out into the new area we weren't familiar with and find something to eat. Fail! It wad Thanksgiving which means EVERYTHING was closed. By mid afternoon we were so hungry, grumpy, tired and exhausted from walking around trying to find food we would have eaten anything at this point but literally couldn't find a single thing. We didn't have a car and walked as far as we possibly could with no luck. Finally we remembered that pizza places delivered and hoped they would be open on Thanksgiving to deliver. Papa Johns you saved us! We ate pizza by the pool and hung out the rest of the day until we could finally go back to the airport. 

We were able to get on another red eye flight later that night and were so excited when the airplane left the ground! We had a connecting flight in San Francisco early morning that we would have to get on immediately after we landing. Unfortunately our flight from Hawaii ended up landing 10 minutes late. Once we got off in San Francisco we literally RAN as fast as we could through the entire airport, jumped on the tram that took us to our terminal just to find out that we would have to go through security AGAIN. Of course we missed our flight and were stuck at the San Francisco airport for 4 hours waiting to get on another flight. We were so irritated and annoyed at this point we would have just driven home if it would have been faster. 

We finally landed in Phoenix around 3pm and all of Jon's family was flying out that evening. We spent an hour with them before they left, we were so disappointed to have such a horrible trip home.

The next morning we packed our stuff again to head up to Flagstaff for a late Thanksgiving dinner with my family and to open all of our wedding gifts. On our way out of town we discovered we had a flat tire. Seriously? Could our luck get any worse? We took it to the tire shop and waited another 3 hours before we finally got on the road.

Other than a few "issues" our honeymoon was beyond fabulous and we loved every minute we were able to spend together as husband and wife!