TABLE OF CONTENTS:
CHAPTER 1: Intro & How We Ended Up Going to Aulani DisBoards | Tumblr
CHAPTER 2: Packing for the Trip & The Flight There DisBoards | Tumblr
CHAPTER 3: The Room & the First Half-Day at Aulani DisBoards | Tumblr
CHAPTER 4: The First Full Day at Aulani DisBoards | Tumblr
CHAPTER 4:
The First Full Day at Aulani (DAY 2)
Apologies for the long span of time since my last post! Things have been a bit busy. My employer recently hosted a conference in Orlando—so things were quite busy leading up to that event and during it.
I imagine some of you may be thinking: did you get a chance to go to the parks while you were there? The answer is yes. The whole family flew down and visited with DG’s parents at their Orlando-area property. DG, a big Harry Potter fan, and I had an opportunity to visit Universal to see the two JK Rowling worlds. We initially decided that the kids were too young for the parks and had planned to just go to Typhoon Lagoon one of the days—figuring it would be similar to some of what Aulani offered.
But being the impulusive, spontaneous guy I am, I made last minute changes and we we ended up spending a day at Magic Kingdom. Both kids loved everything about it—except for the 80 minutes it took to get from paying for parking to walking through the gates and some poor customer service at Casey's Corner. And, despite riding it twice, none of us got the "It's a Small World" song stuck in our heads!
But I digress. This is an Aulani trip report and I’m sure that’s what you want to read about! So, this chapter will cover the first full day we had at Aulani. Without further adieu, here it is:
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I’m a morning person. In fact, I’ll go so far as to say I hate that we have to spend one-third of our lives sleeping. So, as you might guess, I did not sleep in late after our first evening staying at Aulani. Considering the drastic time change, the jet lag and the adrenaline boosts, I had expected to sleep past 7 AM Hawaii time. But there I was…bright eyed and bushy tailed at 5:30 AM ready to start the day.
And…as anybody who has had a baby knows, sleep patterns revolve around the youngest one in the family. As I laid there with the blue glow of my phone keeping my attention, I heard our little one stir and then cry. This woke both DG and Lily as well. So, by 6:15, we were all up with vacation adrenaline pumping through our veins.
As DG fed Alex and Lily played on her Kindle, I decided I would go get DG and I some coffee from ULU Café using our refillable mugs. On top of my desire for some caffeine, I was also driven to do this because I wanted to maximize the value of the mug purchases. (It's why buffets and open bars have led to less-than-rewarding outcomes in my lifetime!)
It was still dark as night out, so I opted to go alone despite Lily’s pleas to go with me. I knew that it’d likely be pretty boring for her to walk a very dark path to a coffee carafe and back again. Plus, in the event she couldn’t control her urge to go into the pools, I didn’t want to try to stop her with two cups of hot coffee in my hands.
Here are a couple of pictures that show you just how dark it was out there.
Living near a major city, it is not common for me to be outdoors at night and not have the sky shining with the orange/pink glow of the city lights. So, for me, walking in what felt like pitch-black darkness felt a little eerie and unusual. Plus, they have minimal lighting at that time through the outside area, so it did make for a rather dark journey.
I made my way to Ulu Café and located the coffee carafes. And this is when I have one of those “bar set too high in my head” moments. As you all know, Disney puts a lot of effort into the little details to create an immersive experience—such as those water candles I talked about in the last chapter.
So, for some reason, I expected to see some elaborate coffee station that was themed with intricate Hawaiian artwork. Instead, what I found was a pretty industrial stainless steel station that was littered with the mess of prior coffee drinkers who are too freaking important to throw their emptied sugar packets into the garbage.
The fact that some people become complete slobs when it comes to getting their own coffee is probably the reason why the station had to be so industrial. As the saying goes,
“this is why we can’t have nice things!”
I made my way back to the room and DG and I enjoyed our coffee as we collectively waited for the sun to rise and the day to begin. So, let me talk about the coffee. I’ve read and heard reviews about the Aulani coffee that have ranged from
“it’s awful” to
“it’s amazingly good.”
Here’s my opinion on it. It is not as bitter (dare I say or as burned) as Starbucks coffee. It is a smooth cup of coffee that’s easy to drink. But, it seems to lack the interesting flavor notes that create a great cup of coffee. So, I’d say it is a good but somewhat neutral tasting cup of coffee. (I don’t know if they rotate coffees or stay with the same blend on an ongoing basis or not.)
Okay, moving on from coffee. The sun seemed like it took forever to rise and I began to get a bit restless with my morning-person energy reserves being mixed with caffeine. DG, on the other hand, was happy waking up slowly on her bed—and Alex had already fell back asleep.
So, I enlisted our four year old to accompany me on a walk around the property. The sun wasn’t fully up, but it was up enough to see more of what was to be enjoyed later. Lily was eager to go and got dressed very quickly.
SIDE NOTE TO PARENTS: You know how you have those times you have to beg your young ones to get dressed and ready to go? Yeah. You probably won’t have that problem very much in Hawaii.
It was about 6:45 when we ventured out. So, here’s my first tip of this chapter to future Aulani guests: if you’re a morning person, go out at least one morning before the sun is fully up and just walk the property. The way they early morning sun blends with the way they light the property makes for a unique and very pretty experience—as you can see with these photos.
It’s a very peaceful walk. All is very still and quiet—even the ocean—or at least it was on this day. As you can see, we made our way down by the beach area where we encountered the first bit of non-tranquil activity going on in the form of the Aulani early-morning fitness classes. We saw guests doing cone drills in the beach sand.
As we watched them sweat, hustle and grunt, I thought to myself,
“now THAT LOT are morning people.” I must admit part of my mind was confused why some would choose that self-torture amidst this paradise?!?!"
Another benefit of taking this early morning walk is that it does provide you with a great way to get a lay of the land without having to navigate through all the guests and workers. As we scouted the location, our first experience with the Hawaiian woman song/prayer blasting over the speaker occurred.
From outside, it’s pretty loud. It startled Lily a bit and she asked what it was. At the time, I had no clue and just told her somebody felt like singing a song to everybody. And, I took that audio cue as reason to think about heading back to our room for breakfast. As I discovered later, that this Hawaiian chant/blessing/prayer/song is heard every morning at 7 AM. As I mentioned earlier, with the sliding door closed, you can't hear it. But I imagine it could work as a great automatic alarm clock for those who wanted to use it for such. If somebody has more details about this that they can share, please do!
After we got back to the room, we decided that we would go to Ama Ama for breakfast. So, this seems like a good time to talk a bit about Aulani restaurants and why they’re not as “insanely expensive” as some have reported.
Let’s start with Ama Ama. This is the priciest restaurant of the lot because it offers ocean view dining and imaginative dishes. This is the one I had heard the most about being way overpriced. Here’s my thoughts: only dinner service is expensive. Like, $40-60 per meal expensive...which is pretty darn expensive. However, breakfast and lunch are actually quite reasonably priced and offer you the same spectacular views—though maybe without the pretty sunset.
Breakfast dishes ranged from $12 – 19. In the hotel/resort universe, that’s actually less than what many charge. Additionally, it’s only marginally higher than what one would pay to go have breakfast at a big chain restaurant like IHOP, Bob Evans, etc.
Lunch is the same story and similar prices. We ate lunch at Ama Ama once and found the food to be very good and the prices to be reasonable.
With young kids, avoiding dinner service there is an easier choice than it is for a couple that is visiting and perhaps Honeymooning—but, if you want to avoid the high dinner prices there but still watch the sunset as you eat dinner, you can go to Ulu Café and get some to-go food and sit on the beach and watch the sun set as you eat.
As I had mentioned in a previous chapter, Ulu café had the most economical prices and the food quality was also very good. Typically, you’ll pay about $10-12 per meal there. With the refillable mugs, you can also save by not having to order drinks.
We ate at Ulu everyday and had either breakfast, lunch and/or dinner there. Breakfast offers a lot of great variety there. Not only do they have hot plates with eggs, bacon, etc., but they also have a wide selection of a la carte pastries—including malasadas (which were quite good!).
It’s hard for me to comment much on the Makahiki restaurant because we only went there once and that was for the character breakfast. I’ll talk in greater detail about that character breakfast experience in a later chapter, but I will talk about the price now.
That breakfast is $35/adult and $18/child. Initially when we planned our trip, we had decided not to do that breakfast based on those prices. However, after seeing how excited Lily got to see the characters, we decided to do it and I’m glad we did go. For one, it was a fun entertainment experience that was very interactive for Lily.
With young kids, restaurant experiences can vary from pleasant to meltdown-mode nightmares. With all of the characters and interactivity, the character breakfast provided mom and dad with some rewarding time to actually sit, relax and enjoy our meals. It felt odd for both of us being there, not having to multitask, just eating our meal!
Two, the buffet is really quite good and features an insanely wide variety of food from Asian specialties, savory lunch like foods and all of the traditional breakfast stuff you can think of.
We also visited Off the Hook a couple of times and, again, found the food to be good and the prices reasonable and in that same $12 – 19/meal range. Our first visit there was to have some drinks while Lily was in Aunty’s beach house. Very tasty mixed drinks and, for nursing mommies, some good virgin mixed drinks as well.
Our second visit to off the hook was for dinner on our last night, which I’ll discuss in a later chapter. The sneak-peak bit of information I’ll share about that is the food at Off the Hook tended to skew more towards the fast food spectrum. Sandwiches, burgers, fries, etc. Tasty food, but I often found it difficult to want to eat heavy meals like that while there.
The Oleo room is the last dining option to discuss. Unfortunately, we tried to go there to grab one of the creative desserts, but it was totally booked. It’s kind of a confusing place to find and go to. It’s more of a wing of the Makahiki restaurant than it is it’s own place. So, if anybody can comment on Oleo food and prices, please do!
To sum it up, don’t worry about restaurant prices. With a little basic strategy, you really won’t feel like you’re spending too much to dine out. Compared with typical hotel/resort food prices, even on the mainland, the cost is actually pretty low.
Back to our breakfast at Ama Ama. This was a very good breakfast! DG ordered Macadamia nut pancakes with a coconut cream and caramel sauce. (I drooled a little after typing that.) I had the egg white farm vegetable frittata that was topped with macadamia nut pesto and goat cheese. Don’t they both sound amazing? Well, they were. Lily had some fresh fruit and yogurt. Here are some pictures of our experience there. You can't beat that view!
So where else would you find those things on a menu? It’s very unlikely you’d find them anywhere. And that is why we were so glad we went there for breakfast!
My theory about vacations is that one should pay for experiences you can’t get close to home. Sure, we paid a little more for Ama Ama breakfast. But we also got to sit at a table overlooking the Pacific, with an ocean breeze and warm sun enveloping our experience. We ate from a menu that had unique, original items and, at the end of it, we found it to be a rewarding, pleasant experience that we’ll remember.
So, here’s the part of this chapter where I start running out of stuff to report—because we honestly spent most of the rest of the day just having fun. I went into this trip knowing I’d write this trip report and I had planned to take a lot more photos and videos.
But I really just got sucked into having a lot of fun and decided to enjoy the present tense experience. Was I missing some great photo opportunities? Yes. But, I know I never missed out on anything at Aulani this day by worrying about any of my little gadgets and devices.
To each their own. However, I do recommend that you try to leave your phone behind as much as possible and work in some “don’t worry about pictures” times. I personally don’t post anything on social media during my vacation time for this reason—and instead will post stuff after returning home.
For one, part of me feels uncomfortable flaunting my good times while others may not be living it up at that time. Two, I don’t like advertising that my home is vacant. And three, vacations take a ton of planning, time and money and are such unique experiences. I always feel like there is some value in not documenting 100% of it…saving some of it for special sections of one’s memory bank.
Sorry, I got off topic a bit there! Anyway, much about day one was purposefully unstructured and free of scheduled stuff to do. When we planned, my concern was that we still may be adapting to the time zone, the long flight, etc. and that starting our trip off with less hustle and running around would help us ease in.
And, I have to say it was the right call. I wouldn’t say we were necessarily dragging or having trouble adapting, but we weren’t exactly at 100 percent. Plus, this strategy gave us some front-loaded “reward” to our trip. I have been guilty of jam packing vacations with activities and then feeling completely exhausted by the time it’s time to fly home. So, it was nice to have some carefree time to start this one off!
If you’re a “jam-everything-in-to-our-schedule” type of person like me, I recommend keeping the first couple days at Aulani open and free. You’ll feel an itch to plan stuff. But just avoid it. What’s nice about Aulani is so much of it is just “walk up and have fun” stuff that you’ll still have full and fun days without planning them out!
So, a lot of our day was spent just enjoying all of the water-related fun. This is really hard stuff to report on. After all, how much can I tell you about what it’s like to be in a pool? Or go into an ocean? So, my apologies that the rest of this chapter will be a little thin!
As I mentioned in a prior chapter, the lazy river is a ton of fun and we got to go in it as a family on this day. It was really fun to see Alex enjoy himself in his little floating device. And, as you can tell in this GoPro video that shows you a full cycle of the river, it is a smile-inducing attraction.
TIP: Learn how to use a GoPro properly if you're new to one. I borrowed this one to use and I kept on shutting it off instead of stopping it, which corrupted several of my videos beyond rescue. Also, practice using it. It's kind of shaky and feels awkward using at first! Apologies for the bouncy video and my occasional awkward facial expression towards the GoPro! 
There is one bit of new information I can share about the lazy river and that is that the water temperature was comfortable to everybody—except Alex would get too cold after about 20 minutes. We found this to be true about all of the water areas in Aulani except the little splash area and the main, big pool—which you can instantly feel is heated to a higher temperature upon entering it. Maybe the water is warmer during summer months? We were there in January and temperatures were typically in the upper 70s and low 80s while we were there.
The next water area I’d like to talk about is the Menehune bridge—or the kids-only splash water area. Visually, this is a very cool-looking area to play in. Water is splashing everywhere and bridges lead to random places including a kid-sized waterslide. Everything seems to be in some sort of perpetual motion and it just looks like a fun thing to play on.
Lily really enjoyed Menehune and I don’t think she would have ever tired from going down that little waterslide that hides inside of it. However, there are some things about it that I didn’t expect that I thought I’d share:
The Splashing Water is Pretty Intense.
This area is more than just some faint lawn sprinkler splashing. There are sections where you are literally dumped with water. For older kids, this is fun. For Lily, it made her very timid going through it. She already wasn’t a big fan of getting splashed in the face (as she takes after her dad). So, when she would go up the bridge to go down the waterslide, she’d cover her face with both hands and very slowly walk through the parts where water splashed pretty heavy down on her. In general, I’d say this area isn’t really made for kids who are five years old or younger, unless they are very natural and experienced with being in splashy water areas...or will endure it long enough to get used to it. Lily did endure and figured out patterns around the things she didn't feel comfortable with.
One area where this is especially true is at the bottom of the little waterslide where there are about a dozen sort of “landmines” to avoid in the form of giant buckets that fill up with water overhead and tip out once full. This is a substantial, heavy amount of water and it’s kind of hard to navigate around because there a so many of them. However, there is a path from the waterslide out of that area that you can figure out after a few attempts.
No Adults Allowed is Strictly Enforced
With Lily’s first few experiences on the bridge, she would get a little overwhelmed and nervous about the water and sort of freeze up. And, parental instinct tells you to go up there and help out, which I did. However, my voyage up the bridge was very short lived because a staffer told me that no adults were allowed onto the bridge at all. They don’t fool around when it comes to this. Somebody is typically always monitoring this and won’t let you get too far up the bridge before you’re booted off. I witnessed several adults get kicked off pretty quickly after walking up.
This can create a little parent anxiety, especially when you can’t see where your child has gone out of view and you can’t go up there to find where he/she is. A couple of times, I had small talk with a mom or dad there who expressed some discomfort not being able to keep an eye on their kids very easily. And it was always a parent of a child who was 3 – 5 years old and still trying to figure out their coordination, balance, water comfort levels, etc. Older kids were mostly left to play unsupervised by their parents...which leads me to the next point.
Unsupervised Kids and the Chaos They Can Create
Parents of younger kids know the concern this brings. Older kids are faster and more athletic but are not fully aware of their surroundings and can be a bit impulsive. When you have a child half the size of them who moves slower and has less coordination, often you see times where the older kids will knock the younger ones over or just push the younger ones out of the way.
When the older kids are unsupervised, it seems like the erratic nature of play gets worse. This can add up to a little bit of parent anxiety. For me, I’ve witnessed several times in the past where Lily has been knocked over and hurt by older kids who unknowingly harm her during their playtime. It’s 99.9% innocent rambunctiousness, but it still causes a bit of concern. On the bridge, there is obviously a higher concentration of kids and many are unsupervised with no parents allowed on it at all. Additionally, all of the water elements and twists and turns in the bridge creating blind spots. This adds up to kids slamming into each other, falling over, etc. Luckily I saw no injuries.
So, if you have younger ones, this will take some supervision and parental assistance. Lily was totally fine the entire time and never had any accidental bumps or bruises. But some others weren’t so lucky.
So, that’s my summary on Menehune Bridge. I hope that what I wrote didn’t make you fear it, because Lily really did have a lot of fun on it. It’s a really fun area and so many kids were having a blast on it while we were there. I just wanted you to know what to expect going in, especially if your kids are as young as mine.
Next, I’ll talk about the beach area. We decided that before lunch, we’d make our first voyage out to actually immerse ourselves in the Pacific ocean. This was a special moment for us because it’d be the first time the kids fully swam in the Pacific ocean. We went back to our room and grabbed a beach back, our sand toys, goggles, bottles of water, sunscreen and diapers/wipes and put them in the beach bag.
We also brought our own beach towels. Though, after our first trip, we decided the towels Aulani gives out worked just as well as the beach towels.
NOTE: Bring a beach bag. Or plan on buying one while there. It’s an absolute necessary thing if you plan on going to the beach area. I guess if you don't bring much to the beach with you, you could avoid it. But, it sure does make life easier as the walk to the beach isn't short for most rooms on the property.
We made our way to the beach area and, I can report that it’s a pretty spectacular beach that is great for kids and adults. While we were there, there was plenty of beach chairs open to grab. We put our things on two of them and made our way to the water.
The sand is soft, though not pillowy soft. There are some occasional rocks in the sand. Again, I highly recommend having water/aqua socks if you aren’t used to barefoot outdoor walking. It’s a very clean beach and offers pretty nice views to either side of it—except for perhaps the new hotel construction that was occurring while we were there.
The ocean on this side of the island seemed to be very peaceful when compared to other areas. There were not a lot of waves at all and the waves that were noticeable were muted by the barrier created by the lagoon walls. I can say that the water is pretty cool—again we were there in January and perhaps the ocean is a little cooler at that time? However after the initial dunk into the water, it was pretty easy to adjust to the water temperature and be comfortable in it.
However, Alex’s ability to adapt to the cold water was a different story. It was pretty apparent after his first dip into the ocean that it was just too cold for him. He was immediately unhappy with being in it. But he did love being held by dad and looking down at the water as it rippled reflections of the sun.
Lily on the other hand really enjoyed being in the water—as did her mom and dad! Here are some pics of us enjoying the ocean and playing in the sand.
After our beach trip, we decided it was time for lunch. Lunch is a pretty tricky meal at Aulani for families because if one wants to go to a place where there are tables or service, this requires going back to your room and changing out of your wet swimwear into dry clothes. This doesn’t sound like a big deal. But it can quickly take precious time away from your day—because you also have to return and change back into your swimwear.
So, our solution for this was to buy our lunches from either Ulu Café or Mama’s Snack Shop and bring the food back to our room to eat outside on our porch/balcony. This way, you can stay in your swimwear while you eat and you don’t have to worry about rushing back to change back into swimwear.
And, I can report that this strategy worked great for us. The mid-day break without having to hustle in and out of swimwear felt more like a respite to us than a hurried transition. Plus, it was nice sitting back, outside in the warm air and people watching as we ate. On this day, I went back with the kids while DG went to ULU to bring back some of the to-go sandwiches, chips and drink refills. DG had the turkey wrap, I the roast beef sandwich and Lily enjoyed another Mickey-shaped PB&J. All were filling and good quality.
During this time, I looked over the daily activity newsletter to see if there was anything we should do this day. However, we didn’t see much on it that we wanted to do (that we hadn’t already missed anyway.) So, we spend the rest of our afternoon having fun in the water.
When things began to shut down for the evening, we made our way back to our room. At this point, our adrenaline had been spent and we were all pretty collectively pretty tired, so we decided to be conservative and stay in the room for the evening.
Part of our fatigue was from the previous day’s travel and rapid time zone change. Another part was that we came from the dead of winter in Chicago where we spent our days mostly inside and bundled up. Spending a full day out in the sun playing in water was just something for which we just didn't have an established level of endurance.
I went to Ulu again to grab a pizza to go and some drink refills—as well as some cookies. I will avoid reviewing the pizza in this report because, being from the Chicago area, we have a standard of pizza that I have discovered is a lot higher than most other places in the country. It’s common to hear from my friends who have moved out of state to complain how they "can’t find a good pizza anywhere.” (And, no, it's not all deep dish! We rarely eat deep dish.)
After our meal, Lily watched some television and DG took care of Alex while I took some time to organize our room. Lily was asleep pretty early that evening and the rest of us were not too far behind.
UP NEXT:
DAY 3 AT AULANI: Pools, Aunty’s Beachhouse and Starlit Hui Fun
