Hawaii Trip Report Part 2: Hiking Diamond Head Crater

Trip Report so far:

Vacation Video
Part 1: Getting There
Part 2: Hiking Diamond Head Crater

Monday, March 9, 2015:

We had spent the night in 2 connecting rooms at the Waikiki Resort Hotel. I was sharing a bed with my 4-year-old daughter, and she woke up for good at 2:00 a.m. local time (7:00 a.m. Texas time, which is typical). Unfortunately, she did not go back to sleep, so neither did I. Joshua woke up around 4:00 a.m., as did Brian and Nathan. We showered and ate breakfast in our room (that I had bought the night before from the store). We were ready for the day's adventure, but we needed to wait for some sunlight before we started.

Today was the day we would hike up the Diamond Head volcanic crater. When I booked this trip a year ago, I immediately set a goal for my whole family to hike this trail. I love hikes with a view! My family had trained for this hike by hiking around North Dallas and by doing stair climbing drills (we would have to climb 227 stairs).

This is Diamond Head, which sits at the end of Waikiki beach.

And here is an aerial view:

By 6:30 a.m., it appeared light enough outside to start the hike. So we made the short drive to Diamond Head from our hotel (about 10 minutes). To get to the parking lot, we drove through this tunnel and parked inside the crater. Parking is $5 per car.

There was a food truck parked there with shaved ice and bottled water.

And a bathroom, in case you need one before or after the hike:

Photo at the Diamond Head sign:

And we asked a stranger to take a photo with me in it:

At the beginning of the trail is a brief history of the crater: (more history here)

The trail starts out like a normal paved trail:

But soon it gets steeper with switchbacks:

I was glad there was a railing on the outside!

After a while, we could see the hikers near the top:

The first set of stairs has 74 steps:

And then we entered the tunnel:

Then there were more outside trails leading to the main staircase of 99 steps:

Then a 54-step spiral staircase. Almost there!

We had to crawl through this opening to get to the top (old military bunker):

And then we were at the top! We had a beautiful view of Honolulu:

And to the west:

And we saw the lighthouse below:

We had a few small raindrops at the top. And I'm not sure if you can tell from this picture, but we also saw a rainbow at the top!

On our hike down, we could also see inside the crater where we parked:

There is an alternative path back down that avoids the spiral staircase, but then it merges with the main path:

The trail is just 1.5 miles round-trip, but it is steep. The kids did great, though! Joshua was happy to be almost done with the hike. He said he loved the view, but not the exercise part.

I didn't time our hike, and we spent quite a bit of time at the top admiring the view, but I think start to finish it took us about 2 hours total.

We skipped the shaved ice back in the parking lot due to a long line and instead drove back to our hotel in Waikiki to hit up McDonalds for a second breakfast. It had been about 4 hours since our first breakfast back in our hotel room. The McDonalds had outside seating near the beach.

After our 2nd breakfast, we walked around Waikiki beach for a few minutes. We wouldn't be returning there until Saturday.

By 10:00, we were checked out of our hotel and on the road to the west side of the island, where we would stay for the next 5 nights.

Edited to add: We witnessed a marriage proposal at the top!

Up next: Our first day at Aulani.

Hawaii Trip Report Part 1: Getting There

Vacation Video

Welcome to my Hawaii trip report! This is one of the ways I document our vacations so that we can reminisce about this trip in the future. My family of 5 recently traveled to Oahu, Hawaii on miles and points for (almost) free. We stayed 2 nights in Waikiki and 5 nights at Disney's Aulani resort. On the return trip, we had an overnight layover in Las Vegas before returning to Dallas.

First, let's talk about finances and saving money on this trip. I posted here and here about how we earned the miles and points for this trip, but due to security issues I didn't post exactly which hotels we visited. Here is a recap of our (almost) free flights and hotels:

Airline tickets: 

We used ~180,000 American Aadvantage miles for 5 round-trip tickets to Honolulu and ~30,000 Southwest Rapid Reward points for 5 one-way tickets from Las Vegas to Dallas. Retail cost for these tickets was ~$4500, but we only paid  $119 ($50 in taxes plus a $69 annual fee for the Chase Southwest Rapid Rewards credit card).

Hotels: 

We used 30,000 Korean Airline Skymiles for 2 hotel rooms for 1 night at the Waikiki Resort Hotel. We had accumulated these miles when we flew to Russia in 2004 and 2007. Retail cost of the rooms was $356.68, but totally free with the Skymiles.

We also used 2 free weekend room certificates earned from a Hilton credit card to stay one night in 2 rooms at the Hilton Hawaiian Village in Waikiki. Retail cost of the rooms was $416.18, but we just paid the $95 credit card annual fee.

We stayed for 5 nights at Disney's Aulani with a 30% off special in a 1-bedroom villa. The cost was $2660.47. We paid for the entire cost of Aulani through various credit card rewards: $1739.73 in Barclay Arrival Plus travel rewards, $460 Capital One Venture travel rewards, $126.81 Discover bonus cash back, $16.27 Disney Reward dollars, $17.66 Ebates Big Fat Check, and $300 in Disney gift cards that my husband won at his workplace. Since we did not have any annual fees on these credit cards, our total out-of-pocket cost for Aulani was $0.

We stayed 1 night at the Hyatt Place in Las Vegas for 8000 Hyatt points. Retail price of the room was $147.84, but we paid $0.

Retail cost of air plus hotels: $8081.17
Our cash cost: $214.00

Of course, in addition to airfare and hotels we incurred other costs like parking, rental car, food and recreation.

Other savings:

We saved money on food by having the hotel free breakfast 7 out of 8 nights and by buying groceries for some lunches and dinners (our villa at Aulani had a full kitchen). We also stuffed a carry-on with food we bought in Texas (since it's cheaper than in Hawaii). I booked our catamaran whale watching/dolphin spotting/snorkeling boat trip using a discount website and saved $75. We saved 10% on our Kualoa Ranch outings by booking ahead online. Grandma and Grandpa gifted our boys their surfing lessons for Christmas as well as our daughter's Keiki Wahine experience (more on those later). I saved up my birthday money from last year to pay for my spa appointment. We pre-purchased Disney gift cards to pay for food and entertainment at Aulani by using my Chase Ink card at Staples (which gets 5% reward points that we will use for a future vacation).

Our trip was not all about savings though...as you will see, we had a few splurges!

Trip Report Part 1: Getting There

A few days before our trip, we took a photo of the kids with our traditional pre-vacation sign:

We only brought 2 suitcases and 1 carry-on (in addition to each of us carrying a small backpack for the plane). Our villa included a washer and dryer, so we didn't see the need to bring a lot of clothes. The carry-on was full of food.

Sunday, March 8, 2015:

Our limo picked us up at 8:00 a.m. Yes, you read that correctly, our limousine:

This was our first splurge. Since we were flying out of DFW but flying back into Dallas Love Field, we couldn't park our car at the airport. When I was researching rides to the airport, this limo was only $15 more than a Super Shuttle van. Our kids were shocked. This was their first time in a limo, and only the second time for Brian and me.

So that was a fun way to start our trip. We made it through airport security with no issues and found this lovely playground for the kids to run off some steam before our long flight.

It really was a great find just a few gates down from our gate. The only problem was that Alyssa liked the playground a little too much and she refused to go to the bathroom before our flight because she didn't want to leave the playground. I had to practically drag her to the bathroom with her screaming that she didn't want to go with me. I was sure I would be stopped by security for looking like I was kidnapping a child.

We would be on the plane for a little over 9 hours if we counted from the time we boarded until the time we arrived in Honolulu. American Airlines doesn't serve any meals on domestic flights, even the long ones. Our plan was to buy fast food at DFW shortly before we boarded at 11 a.m. and have that for lunch. I had packed us sandwiches for dinner later in the flight.

Except our plan didn't go so well, because the plane started boarding earlier than scheduled and we wanted to board early to get a good spot in the overhead compartment for our carry-on bag. So I boarded the plane with the kids while Brian went foraging for food to take on the plane. McDonalds was still serving breakfast, so he had to run down to Wendy's. I was super stressed on the plane, thinking he wasn't going to make it back before the plane took off. Luckily, he did make it back on time.

The flight went ok for the most part. Unfortunately, the travelers in front of Alyssa and I chose to recline their seats fully for the duration of the flights and a man's head was practically in my lap the entire trip. This American Airlines plane was the oldest and most cramped airplane of our trip, but hey, we couldn't complain because we were still flying to Hawaii for free!

We arrived in Honolulu around 3:00 p.m. (8:00 p.m. Texas time). The airport had a lot of open-air sections, and the trees were beautiful.

Photo of the kids near the "Aloha, Welcome to Hawaii" sign.

Since we were landing at 8:00 p.m. Texas time and we knew the kids would be tired soon, we didn't want to stay at Aulani the first night. We booked the Waikiki Resort Hotel using Korean Airline Skymiles points. Our plan was to drive the roughly 30 minutes to the hotel, get some food and get to sleep so that we'd be fresh for the next day.

We had heard that traffic in Honolulu is bad, but since we were arriving on a Sunday afternoon we figured we would miss the bad rush hour. We were wrong. It took us over 2 hours to make the normal 30 minute drive! The kids were miserable in the back seat...so hungry and tired, and we couldn't find anywhere to pull over and re-group. It turns out that the Honolulu Festival and parade was happening that day, and several roads in the Waikiki area were closed, resulting in huge traffic jams. My kids still remember that horrible car ride....in fact, my son says that he loved our trip "except for that horrible car ride on the first day."

We got two connecting rooms at the Waikiki Resort Hotel. Here is what a room looked like:

And the nice open-air lobby:

Gift shop area:

And the fountain outside the hotel:

I think we may have been the only non-Korean travelers staying at this hotel, but we didn't care. It was in a great location in Waikiki! I walked to a store near the hotel to grab some sandwiches, and after we ate we decided to walk the short 1/2 block to Waikiki beach. After all, this was our first night in Hawaii and we were excited to be out of the car! It was after sunset and perfectly pretty outside.

A local was explaining the Honolulu Festival to us...there was a parade in progress with sparklers and fireworks soon to start.

It felt almost surreal to be there at the beach and watching the parade.

We saw this huge banyan tree near the beach:

But by now, it was after midnight Texas time and our kids were fading fast. Although we wanted to stay for the fireworks, we knew that wouldn't be possible. So we walked back to our room to get some sleep. We had big plans for the next morning!

Next up: Hiking Diamond Head

Things I Will Not Do to Save Money on a Vacation

I'm all for saving money on vacations. Sometimes, getting the price down is the difference between going on a vacation and staying home. I'm sure some of you are thinking that there's nothing I wouldn't do to save money on a vacation. Not true! There are some things I won't do.

But first, here is a list of things I regularly do to save money on vacation:


Things I will do:

*  Use Credit Card Rewards. Of course I will do this! But slowly and responsibly. Our upcoming trip to Hawaii took a few years of strategizing with several credit cards.

*  Fly on discount airlines. Yes, I've flown on Spirit and lived to tell about it. Flights to my hometown are super cheap! But I know enough about the airline to avoid flying it right before a cruise or another major event, since Spirit doesn't have reciprocal agreements with the other major airlines in case there is mechanical trouble.

* Fly in coach. This seems like an obvious thing, but I'm always amazed by how many people will fly only in first class or business in order to go on a trip.

* Cook meals. We have stayed in condos and rental houses with full kitchens, and to save money we have gone to the grocery store and cooked breakfast and dinner in the condo. It saves a ton of money on going out to eat. I have no problem doing this, but I admit I also love NOT having to cook on a cruise!

Kitchen at Wyndham Bonnet Creek condo close to Disney World

* Bring lunch. Most theme parks allow you to bring in food, and sometimes we pack our own lunches. I recently read a trip report from a family that ate PB&J while they were sightseeing in Hawaii, and that's going to be us! We do like to splurge on some meals, though, but sandwiches for lunch is no big deal to me or my kids.

Eating a packed lunch of PB&J at The North Pole amusement park in Colorado

* Ask for and use discounts and coupons. If we know what attractions we're visiting ahead of time, I will research online to find discounts and coupons. Recently, I called a surfing school to ask if they had any coupons or discounts, and I was given a discount over the phone just for asking.

* Go during the off-season. Usually, this involves pulling my kids out of school, which so far has not been an issue. Crowds and prices are lower when school is in session. As my kids get older, this may no longer be an option.


What I Will Not Do: (and no judgement from me if you do any of these things! :) )

* Sleep overnight in an airport. At least not by choice. My whole family would be a mess if we had to do this during a layover. We had the chance to do this on our way back from Hawaii if we would have taken the earliest flight back with a 5-hour layover in the middle of the night in the Las Vegas Airport. But, no thanks. We opted to take a later flight and stay the night in a hotel. I realize that people without kids or people who sleep better in public places might not think this is a big deal to do.

* Listen to a timeshare presentation for a gift. Not while we're on vacation. My time is just too precious on a trip, the presentations always take much longer than they say, and we know we're never going to buy a timeshare (well, maybe a Disney Vacation Club one day.....)

* Buy discounted tickets from a questionable website. I saw a post a while ago on a message board about a website selling deeply discounted tickets to Disney World. Disney does not sell deeply discounted tickets, so there was no way I was jumping on that bandwagon. I read the site was shut down hours later. Not sure if people ended up with their tickets.

* Haggle/barter with vendors selling souvenirs. I know in some countries, this is standard practice. We were advised to haggle with vendors at the straw market in Nassau to get the prices down. But I'm just not too comfortable with this, especially since I feel the prices are already so cheap! I spent a few months traveling in Guatemala during college, and everything involved haggling--including taxi fares. It was exhausting and uncomfortable for me.

The Straw Market in Nassau, The Bahamas

Obviously, my choices of what I won't do to save money on vacation are based on my personal experiences and are very subjective. What are things you refuse to do to save money on a vacation???

$35 Balance and Other Hawaii Pre-trip Excitement

I wrote a post last fall about how we are taking our family of 5 to Hawaii for (almost) free using airline miles and points that we accumulated by reading and following advice from several travel blogs. At the time I wrote that post, it was looking like we would just have to pay $50 total in taxes for our airline tickets and a few hundred dollars total for 8 nights of hotel.

I'm excited to report that our current hotel balance is only $35.56! And it's looking like we are on track to pay off 100% of our hotel expenses through travel credit card rewards before our departure in a few weeks. Woohoo!

We can thank Discover card and Ebates for this extra "free" money. Over the holidays, Discover card sent me a letter offering an extra $120 in cash back bonus if I spent a total of $1000 on my card over a period of 4 months. It was easy for us to switch our normal monthly spending over to this card until we had accumulated enough for the extra cash back. I also used the Ebates portal for some online purchases of Christmas gifts, which gave us more "free" cash for our Hawaii hotel fund.

In other pre-trip news....we have spent the past few months learning about Hawaiian history and culture with our kids. We do this prior to every vacation, and there was a lot of accessible information for Hawaii at the library and online.

We checked out some kid-friendly books from the library:

And we watched some videos on Amazon Prime and YouTube about Hawaii and Oahu specifically.

But can you guess what my kids' favorite pre-trip activity has been??? Watching 3 episodes of The Brady Bunch where the family goes to Hawaii.

The Brady Bunch in Hawaii

My boys thought this show was HILARIOUS! And it actually shows a lot of the sights on Oahu. (See this post for The Brady Bunch Guide to Hawaii). They even asked to see other episodes of the show that were not Hawaii-related. I might have to download some on an iPod for airplane viewing.

So what's left to do before our trip? Buy new water shoes and sunscreen, figure out what we're going to pack and find things to occupy our kids for 9 hours on the airplane.

I can't believe this trip is really happening!

My Longest Flight Ever!

I read a lot of travel blogs that focus on collecting airline miles and points, and recently a few of them have had lively debates on flying overseas in business class seats vs. coach seats. And I seem to be in the minority of those blog readers who feel that traveling in coach is an acceptable option for long flights.

When it comes to vacations, I'm more in the camp of "it's the destination, not the journey." I'll fly Southwest, Spirit or any other low-budget airline if it gets my family safely to our vacation destination.

With that in mind, I'm going to share my longest/worst flight experience. The year was 2009. My husband, 4-year-old son and I had been in Russia to complete the adoption of our newest family member, 17-month-old Joshua. Due to cost and my husband's work obligations, we decided that my husband and oldest son would fly home to Dallas after our court hearing and I would stay the remaining 2 weeks in Russia by myself to complete the adoption process. This meant that I would fly home by myself with my new son.

Before our journey home, I was already exhausted. I had gotten a nasty sinus infection while in Russia and had been through some interesting medical procedures in the days leading up to our departure. I wasn't sleeping well due to my sinus infection and due to my new son's sleeping issues.

Our journey home was over 30 hours, door to door. That included 16 hours of actual flight time and time spent in the Vladivostok, Russia and Seoul, South Korea airports.

Waiting at the airport in Vladivostok, Russia

Our first flight from Vladivostok to Seoul was less than 2 hours in length. To board, we had to go down some stairs and board a bus that would take us to the airplane. My son was already screaming before we boarded the flight because we were stuffed into a crammed, padlocked waiting area for about 30 minutes prior to getting on the bus. Our flight was 45 minutes late taking off. Still screaming and crying.

At one point during the flight, I took Joshua to the bathroom to change him and noticed there was an empty row of seats at the back of the plane. I asked if we could move back there, and the flight attendant said yes.


Moving to our own row helped some. Keep in mind that my son did not speak or understand English and I was communicating to him with my limited Russian language skills.

We landed in Seoul at 11:00 p.m. and went straight to Burger King. I ate the best tasting Whopper I've ever had!

Our flight to Dallas didn't leave until the next morning, so I rented a room at the hourly hotel inside the Seoul airport. It's not as shady as it sounds. In the morning before our flight, we stopped at this airport playground to get some energy out.

But next was our big flight--over 14 hours straight from Seoul to Dallas. The plane was configured in a 2-4-2 arrangement, and Joshua and I had a row of 2 by the window to ourselves. I had high hopes that he would sleep for a good chunk of our long flight.

But of course I was wrong! But at least he wasn't screaming like on the earlier flight. The only way to keep him happy was to constantly feed him cheerios and Gerber puffs. I almost had him asleep on my lap at one point, but a flight attendant came over and started talking loudly to be and he immediately opened his eyes.

A 14-hour flight with a toddler is very, very long.

Early into the flight, my son had a big diaper blowout. It was so bad that I wound up throwing his outfit away. No problem, I had extra changes of clothes.

But the little girl in the row next to us was not feeling so well. She was throwing up about every 20 minutes all over the floor and her seat. The flight attendants would come around spraying air freshener after each round.

Joshua slept for 45 minutes, and that's it. I guess it's better than nothing!

One of the things that kept my spirits up on this trip was I knew that the moment the wheels touched down in Dallas, my son would become a U.S. citizen and our family would be complete! (Except, of course, that God had other plans!)

When we landed in Dallas, I carried Joshua in a baby carrier for 2 hours while we waited in the customs line (because otherwise he kept running all over the place). But we survived! I look back at this long flight now with humor and a sense of accomplishment.

We are taking our 3 kids on a 9 hour flight in the next few weeks, and we have plans to fly them to Europe someday. Most certainly in coach. And we will all survive and still enjoy our destination regardless.

What is your longest flight ever? Would you do it again?

What's In Our Wallet

Edited to note that this credit card is no longer available.

It's no secret that I read several miles and points blogs to help me figure out how to achieve our family vacations for the least amount of out-of-pocket money. I do not profess to be an expert at collecting miles and points, but I've been asked by a few people what credit card we are currently using to collect miles and points.

And it's this: US Airways Premier World Mastercard by Barclay. We were really not considering this credit card because we were working on accumulating Southwest miles through Southwest credit cards, but so many bloggers were talking about the tremendous value of using the airline miles of this card:

The Points Guy--50,000 US Airways Dividend Miles and 10 Great Ways to Use Them
Mommy Points--US Airways MasterCard Increases Offer to 50,000 Bonus Miles!
Million Mile Secrets--Limited Time 50,000 Point US Airways Card Sign-up Bonus
and even potentially using the miles for hotel stays by Miles for Family.

The deal with this card is when you pay the $89 annual fee and make your first purchase (could be as small as a pack of gum), you get 50,000 US Airways Dividend miles. If your spouse also applies for a card and does the same, that's 100,000 US Airways Dividend miles for $178 in annual fees. And since American Airlines is merging with US Airways, in the second quarter of 2015 those US Airways miles will become 100,000 American Airlines Aadvantage miles. We will likely cancel this card within the year so that we don't pay another year of annual fees.

Most airline credit cards require a larger minimum spending over the first 3 months in order to qualify for the bonus miles, so just purchasing one small thing and paying an annual fee is a great offer for that many miles.

So what will we do with our 100,000 American Airlines miles? We aren't sure yet, but we will most likely use them for a trip in 2016 or 2017.

These miles could pay for 3 round-trip tickets to Hawaii during off-peak months:

Snorkeling near Maui??

 
Or 4 round-trip tickets to Vancouver, Canada to take a Disney Cruise to Alaska:

Or 4 round-trip tickets to the Caribbean or Mexico during off-peak months:

Bahamas

Or 5 1-way tickets to Europe during off-peak months:

France

It's fun to dream about where these miles could take us.

And that's what's in our wallet.

(Note: We pay off our credit card balances every month. Please don't consider applying for new credit cards before you read Mommy Point's Beginner's Guide or Million Mile Secret's Beginner's Guide.)