The Honeymoon, Part I

The wedding was on Sunday, the 26th, and we were up early Monday morning to say good-bye to my mom and sisters, then hop in the car with Julia's dad so he could take us to the airport. He was also nice enough to then turn right around and pick up my mom and sisters and take them to the airport about an hour later.

Anyway, we boarded the plane, had a very nice flight that felt surprisingly short (it's about five hours) and landed in Hawaii on Oahu, I believe. After a short wait, we boarded another plane to Hawaii proper and were in the open-air airport within the hour. We were pretty surprised by the openness of the airport, but it really didn't have any walls (except for the three or four stores).

Julia'd signed us up to receive leis, so we were greeted by a nice woman who gave us the official Hawaii welcome and then placed leis around our necks. Cool.

We'd rented a car and when we were picking it up decided to upgrade from a normal ol' sedan to a convertible Mustang. It was an extra $100, but over the course of the week it definitely proved worthwhile. The island has some truly magnificent scenery and enjoying it with the sun down was fantastic. Actually, I think about ten minutes after with put the top down Julia said, "Oh, yeah, this was a good idea!" Once we had the car we tried to make our way to the house we'd rented. Unfortunately, despite all the preparations we'd made for the wedding, we hadn't even thought about the honeymoon, so we didn't have the address, maps, nothing. After a couple of quick phone calls to people who could access email we at least had the address. Unfortunately that didn't help much. We drove. And drove. And drove. And when we called the woman we were renting from she wasn't much help. Eventually we started paying attention to addresses and it was clear we were way past where we should be; like 20 miles or so. We were pretty tired and annoyed, but we eventually found the place.

What we'd rented was a guest house on a small coffee farm in the Kailua/Kona region (100% Kona coffee!). The house looks like this. As you can see, it's quite nice and very comfortable. The only drawbacks (which we learned over time) were that they hadn't turned on the hot water, so the first couple of showers were a bit chilly. And some geckos had found their way into the cottage. They were kind of cute, but we learned they sort of, um, pooped when they were walking on the walls and ceiling. Now, that's really not too bad since geckos are about the size of your longest finger and their poop looks like bid poop. But, y'know, that's not the most awesome thing to find on the floor, bed, or bookcase. Oh, and we couldn't use the pool. Initially that bothered us, but over the course of the week we found plenty of things to do, so we didn't even miss it.

Once we were settled in the house and had unpacked a bit we decided to head into town to get some dinner. The trip down the mountainside to Kailua took about 15 minutes and we made that trip many, many times over the course of our week. The town was very touristy, but on this first night all we cared about with dinner, which we had at a pub and brewery (where we saw our first gecko!). After dinner we stopped at a nearby grocery store to pick up some supplies for the house. We decided since we had a pretty standard kitchen we ought to take advantage of it by picking up some things to eat -- at least for breakfast. We didn't end up eating everything we bought, but it was definitely nice to have something to drink and snack on during our time there.

After our excursion we returned to the cottage, read our books, and crashed. We thought we were two hours ahead and we didn't figure out until about three days into the trip that we were actually three hours ahead. It wasn't unusual for us to crash at 9:00 or 10:00 in the evening and that made a lot more sense once we figured out that actually meant 12:00 or 1:00 at night.

Day two and most of the days to follow were much more action packed, but I'm going to head home now, so I'll have to type that up tomorrow.