Hawaii

There's nowhere else in the world like it.

After eleven action-packed days in Hawaii, Lorena and I have returned to California. This also marks a temporary break in our travel for a few months, after a whirlwind of activity since February.

The trip was my idea. In January, Lorena asked me what I wanted to do for my 40th birthday. At first, I said “nothing.” But the more I thought about it, the more I wanted to do something special for reaching 40 years of life. I love the ocean, and I love the beach. I began to think about where I would want to go to celebrate with Lorena, and Hawaii came to mind.

An Activity Every Day

Something I enjoyed about our recent trip to Sedona was that we had a planned activity every day. Some days it was one thing, and other times it was two, but the nice thing was that we didn't have to figure out what to do when we were there.

So, I did the same thing for Hawaii. Each day I had an activity planned. I bought tickets in advance for the things that required tickets, so all we had to do was just show up. We did make one or two modifications to the agenda based on how we were feeling and the weather, but overall we stuck to it.

Some of the things we did:

And obviously, we took time to explore between the events that we had planned.

But we didn't love everything.

Overall, we enjoyed most things about Oahu, but there were a few things that started to become challenging.

First, we eat primarily vegan (except for fish now and again, which we enjoyed on this trip). Hawaii does not have a ton of vegan-only restaurants. In fact, they really only had one. We did find vegan meal options at the restaurants that we chose, but none of them were that great. Overall, we rated our food experience a 6 out of 10 for the trip.

Next, parking. My goodness, I've never seen a city that has been so poorly set up for parking. Living in the LA area, I'm used to hunting for parking. Honolulu is next level difficult. There is very little street parking, and also not many parking structures. We often needed to park several blocks away from where we were trying to go.

Finally, because the buildings on the island are a bit older, over half of the restaurants we visited didn't have bathrooms. This was annoying after some time. You usually had to walk around to find a public bathroom. Many of the restaurants did have one bathroom, but they were almost always “employees only.”

A Special Place

There is just something magical about Hawaii for me. I think it's because it's so isolated from the rest of the world, there's a sense of community and responsibility for nature. There is no arguing over climate change, what constitutes littering, pollution, and the like. Everyone just “gets it”. You just don't see this in many places.

Our trip was eye-opening on many levels. We have even started to talk about the possibility of living in Hawaii. Not anytime soon (we just moved), but we may take more trips to the islands to see if that's a feeling that grows. If that is indeed in our future one day, then it would certainly be the island of Oahu where there is access to Honolulu, the largest city. Oahu has about one million people on it, easily the most populated. Because of this, it has access to most of today's modern conveniences.

But for now, we are back in Culver City. I must admit, it feels great to be home. No trips are planned at the moment, but we have a few ideas – including a return to Hawaii.

#personal

Justin Ferriman

Justin Ferriman

Amateur blogger for over 20 years. I write about life, happiness, entrepreneurship, and politics. Full bio.