Hawaii 2010- Day 1

Mom and Karl arrived on Thursday Oct. 14th to help watch the kiddos, and without whom we would not have been able to make this trip. Thank you!!

Friday was spent running my mom around and showing her the lay of the land, then Friday night Brad and I headed up to Portland for the night so we could fly out of PDX in the morning.

We stayed at Aloft which is a "modern" hotel with a night club scene in the lobby.

I was happy to be greeted by this guy singing Hawaiian music :D

I thought the bar looked super cool!

Our "modern" bathroom

Too bad our "modern" hotel came with a lot of "modern" reminders of noise. Our room was right by the elevator and was the noisiest elevator shaft I have ever heard! I had trouble sleeping and woke up early from all the noise

(you'll notice I look... a little less than rested in the remainder of the days pictures)

We started with the crumbliest chocolate croissant for breakfast at the airport

The 6 hours later, we got off the plane in Honolulu and I saw this:

Hooray! We were really in Hawaii!! We had about a 2 hour layover before our flight to Kona, so we got to hang out in these beautiful gardens, right in the middle of the airport!!
We saw a couple birds in the airport there too!
We arrived safely in Kona, got our rental car and head out to where everyone wants to go first when they get to Hawaii.....

COSTCO!!!

Pathetic.. I know... but we wanted to stalk up our hotel fridge with cheap eats for breakfast and lunch while we were there.

When we got to our hotel, the Hapuna Prince, the sun was just starting to set.

This is the beautiful view from our balcony in our room.

We got set up in our room, went down and listened to the lounge singer in the open air lounge looking out over the ocean, with the smell of the sweet flowers air, then went for a walk along the beach with a beautiful, near full moon.

We made it! We were actually IN HAWAII!!