It happened! We got married! All the planning and stressing came to a close on November 3rd and it was a wonderful day. You can check out both our ceremony and reception blog posts if you haven’t already and now it’s time for our honeymoon!
The day after our wedding we drove back home to Astoria. We were exhausted and we still had to pack 8 days worth of items for our trip to Hawaii! We were leaving the next day! So we put on some mindless TV, ordered Duzan (one of our favorite takeout places), and packed everything up. Around 10pm we went to bed with our alarm set for 3am.
We woke up the next morning at 3am and drove to Newark airport. We made it through security pretty quickly. Once settled we went on the hunt for breakfast.
Newark airport recently underwent a renovation. It looks fantastic, but they pretty much got rid of all name brand places to eat. It’s so hard to find a Starbucks or a Dunkin (they are there..somewhere). When traveling we really crave these fast food style places.
We went for one of the fancy quick service options that offer bagels. Tom did a cinnamon raisin with butter and I went for whole wheat with peanut butter and jelly. The bagels were basically messy bread and we ate them just to survive our first flight to Denver.
On our flight to Denver, we watched Netflix and read. It took us about 3 1/2 hours to get there. Upon arrival, we were ready for lunch, but the time difference had other plans. It was second breakfast for us. We had McDonald’s and then waited an hour to board our flight to… KONA!
7 1/2 hours worth of movies and napping later we were finally landing on the Big Island of Hawaii! From the window of the plane we could see the Pacific Ocean and lava! We were freaking out and to top it all off we got to deplane on a stair-car (Arrested Development anyone?) and right on to the tarmac!
From there it was a short walk over to baggage claim (the whole airport is open air). Our luggage arrived quickly and then we walked right into the parking lot to grab our Jeep for the week! We rented from Turo. Their app was very easy to use and Joe the owner of the jeep was so friendly. They even left us beach gear to use.
It was about a 30-minute drive to the hotel from the airport. On our way, we noticed we were no longer on the east coast of the mainland. There are no words to describe how cool this place is. We felt like we were on another planet as we drove through the lava flow desert. We even spotted a rainbow. We knew at that moment this trip was going to be magical.
We arrived at the Hilton Waikoloa Village exhausted and excited. Our check-in process was easy, but don’t let TV shows and movies fool you-you do not get anything special if you are on your honeymoon! No free upgrade or anything like that… we tried. They did, however, give us beautiful leis for being on our honeymoon, but you don’t get them if you aren’t celebrating anything..so that’s also a TV movie LIE!
We waited for the monorail to arrive to take us to our room. We got on and quickly noticed we were going the wrong way. Eventually, it started to go back the other direction and about 20 minutes later we were at our room and realized it would be faster to walk. I’m glad we caught on early.
We booked a room in the Makai Tower, this is their fanciest option. We wanted something special since you only get one honeymoon. It also at the time of booking offered a bunch of benefits that they no longer offered during our stay (like being able to use the paddle boards and kayaks), but we did have special access to the pool with reserved seating and access to the spa. We also had special Makai beauty products in our room. They smelled amazing like chocolate mango.
The room was pretty standard, a king size bed, bathroom, and balcony. It was our view that blew us away. The room overlooked both the ocean and the dolphin pool. It was incredible.
Before unpacking we needed to go get dinner. We were so so hungry only having 2 small fast food breakfasts. We picked the Lagoon Grill for it’s close proximity to our room. We sat out on the water and enjoyed cocktails while we waited for our sandwiches.
I ordered the Blackened MahiMahi sandwich and Tom had the American Kobe Burger. Food-wise there’s nothing really to report. It was fine. It was a chilly night, but it was so incredible sitting outside with our whole exciting trip ahead of us.
Back at the room we got comfy and planned to watch TV until 9:00pm because that seemed like an acceptable time to go to bed. We were 5 hours behind and only made it to about 8:15 (1:15am our time).
See you next week for our first full day. Since this post was a lot of travel and fast food we put together a highlight reel of our trip for you! Check it out!
The Cocho Life 