Aulani Day 4, Wednesday, April 13, 2016
Remember I wrote on
Day 1 that I woke up to DS coughing in his bedroom a few hours before we got on the plane? Well, it happened again, except this time he
coughed and
coughed and
coughed and coughed around midnight. Since he showed no sign of stopping on his own, I got up and gave him honey to soothe his throat. When that didn't help, I told him to do his deep breathing exercise, you know, breathe iiiiin, breathe oooouuuutttt, vvvvveeeerrryyyyy slooooooowwwwwlllllyyyyy. After 5 minutes of that, he still showed no signs of improvement, so I told him to go out to the balcony because I didn't want him to wake up DD (couldn't tell if she was awake by then, probably, but not sure) or our neighbors. He also sounded slightly croupy (ack!) and I had heard that cold air helps.
One word on neighbors: Although the resort was supposedly at
95% capacity that week, we didn't hear our neighbors once.
Maybe we heard people walking down the hallway one time, but never from next door. Don't know if it was the great soundproofing or there happened to be no one next door. But anyway, it was nice.
Back to my coughing son... On the balcony, he again coughed and coughed and coughed, in fact he coughed so much that he
threw up. Aaaargh! I tried to soak up as much as I could with the Kleenex we had from the bathroom, and I also threw water to clean up the rest. This was in complete darkness, too. I'll spare you the details. But if you're a parent, you know what I'm talking about, so I'll just leave it at that.
After I don't know how long (I didn't want to look at the clock, too depressing), eventually he stopped, and DH, DS, and I all went back to bed.
At 4:15 I woke up again to
more coughing, this time from DD!!!! BUT thankfully it was just a few small coughs. I tossed and turned and fell asleep again. At 7 I woke everyone up. This morning we had a very slow start as we were all very tired, so no eggs and ham--it was just cereal and fresh berries this time.
DH went downstairs at 8 to get a life vest for DD, and we met up with him maybe 10-15 minutes after. This time we secured some chairs towards the back of the
infinity pool, and this was our view (taken later in the day):
At 8:30 as was our habit we went into the
lazy river first. Despite much coaxing, DS and DD refused to join me at the
water slides, so I went down the open, gentler slide by myself. This is the one whose entrance was on the right as you waited on the staircase. I waited with my inner tube and chatted with my neighbors, then went down it. Wasn't too bad, though it was much faster and more twisty than I expected. When I came out at the bottom near the entrance to the lazy river, DH (with our camera), DS, and DD were waiting for me to capture it on video. We did a couple more rounds of lazy river before heading into the
infinity pool:
Spent about an hour there, then we got out around 10 to have snacks at our chair before going back to our hotel room. Why did we get out so early today? We actually had grandiose plans for the day, because I wanted to go to the
turtle place at Paradise Cove and this awesome beach called
Ka'ena Point Beach, which is located at the westernmost point of Oahu. I had read about it here on the disboards (post #611 in
this thread). The picture just looked so stunning on that page that we just had to pay a visit.
Anyway, we went back to the hotel room and I think I made sandwiches for everyone. Then we went downstairs to
Alamo to pick up our rental car. A fairly easy process, it was. It was right outside the hotel on the right side (with your back to the ocean). There were one party of four adults ahead of us. After they left, we handed the agent our paperwork, then went downstairs into the garage to claim our car. As we waited there, the party ahead of us climbed into a small SUV and drove off. But right before that, DS (or was it DD?) exclaimed, hey, that's our car! Turns out it was the same car we had driven from HNL to Aulani three days ago, and DS/DD recognized the license plate. Funny!
After we got into our new car, we drove across the street to the
ABC store, picked up some straw mats (that for some reason Target didn't have) for our beach excursion, plus some Kona coffee for family back home.
Here are three random photos of their grocery section:
Pulled out of the parking lot at 12:46. I can't believe it took us that long to get outta the Aulani area to be on our way... We got out of the pool more than 2.5 hrs ago!!!
But first we had to decide if we wanted to go to the turtle lagoon first. We thought, nah, we can always do that on the way back, it was getting close to 1 so we better get on our way to Ka'ena Point. As we drove out of the area along the greens of the Ko O'lina Golf Club, due to the
LPGA tournament taking place that week, we caught a glimpse of
Michelle Wie:
Just kidding! No, I don't know if it was Michelle Wie, but she supposedly was there that week playing in the tournament.
Ka'ena Point, according to Google Maps, is 19 miles away from Aulani and would take us 38 minutes to get there. Just follow Hwy 93 all the way up to the northwest point, to the end of the highway. We drove through all these small towns, passing a couple McDonald's, a KFC, and the usual places you see everywhere else. There was some traffic, but nothing horrendous. Just a lot of stop lights, it felt like. The water along the way was blue and turquoise and simply beautiful:
At 1:20 we were still driving, moving at 25 miles an hour, and it felt like we were never going to get there...
Suddenly we drove past
Makaha Beach Park, which is a name I recognized from that Disboards thread mentioned above, so I knew we must be close. I saw that there was a lifeguard there and a place to wash off, so I made a note to myself that if we couldn't find Ka'ena Beach or if it didn't work out somehow, we could always turn around and come back here.
After a few more minutes we saw this beach in the distance, and based on the location, figured it must be our destination:
The traffic came to a sudden halt. There were probably 7-8 cars in front of us, waiting for something. After waiting in the car for 5-10 minutes I got impatient--what the heck were we waiting for??? We were like this (makes tiniest distance between thumb and index finger) from our beach!!!! I got out of the car and walked ahead. I stopped about two cars up because (don't laugh) because a lady had pushed the door open and her legs were hanging out. She seemed friendly when I looked at her, so I asked her what the deal was. Turns out a crew (of what? I forgot to ask) had found some
unexploded ordinance up ahead and were disarming it! They were only allowing cars to pass by every 15 minutes. Now I'm thinking of that scene from "The English Patient", where all these tanks were passing by on a bridge above and the poor bomb guy was trying to defuse the bomb below... Anyway, the lady said they had already been waiting for 10 minutes. I sighed and said that we were on our way to Ka'ena Point. The lady (who was apparently a local) said oh, it is well worth the wait, it is beautiful and you should go. I thanked her, then went back to the car. Within a few minutes they re-opened access and we were on our merry way.
Parked our car, used the bathroom (and the Disboards report was correct, there was indeed an outdoor shower too), and we were treated to this view (panoramic so somewhat warped):
Here's another one, looking back south:
It really was a stunning beach. The blue water was exactly what I had in mind in terms of a postcard from a Hawaiian beach (no coconut trees in the background though, hmm). I counted no more than five other people on the beach besides my family, plus a few more in the water, and that was it. Very private. There was a manned lifeguard's shack off to the right of the panoramic photo above.
The waves here were
much stronger than the baby ones at Aulani's lagoon, however. Due to the
riptide warnings posted nearby, we didn't dare let our kids stay by the edge of the water for more than 10 minutes. They were very happy to play with sand anyway--good thing the sand toys we bought from Target didn't go to waste. But anyway, the waves were so strong that even I got swept off my feet several times.
The weather changed briefly (see the big cloud swooping in from the left in the picture above). There was a very light, gentle drizzle which went away after a few minutes. The sea breeze and the sound of the crashing waves made us that much more aware of the power of nature.
There was a guy fishing with two fishing poles. I asked him what fish could be had here, but the waves were so loud that I couldn't quite hear his answer, and, since I don't really know fish that well (unless you give me their names in sushi, lol), I figured there was really no point in asking again anyway, so I left the guy alone. While we were there he did catch a fish, maybe less than a foot long. DS, DD, and the one other kid who was there ran to the guy, but he said it was too small to keep. He unhooked the fish and tossed it back into the ocean.
At 3 o'clock we decided to start heading back because we still had high hopes of catching a glimpse of the
sea turtles at the cove next door to Aulani. We asked a couple who were hanging out nearby to take an obligatory family photo of us (which turned out to be fuzzy once I looked at it more closely in the car, because the lens of my phone was smeared with sunscreen, bah), then we showered and drove off at 3:20.
To be continued...
I'm surprised to see that milk is actually priced similarly to the price that I pay.
If you had been placed in a room facing the Waikolohe Valley, that would have been either a poolside garden view or ocean view room since island garden view rooms do not face the Waikolohe Valley. The island garden view 1bedroom villas that are over the convention center aren't bad at all either - at least they are higher up so that at least you would have gotten a nice view of the mountains.
I hope he didn't have a repeat performance for the rest of the trip. Poor wee boy!
