Honeymoon Day 7!
Today was February 23rd, it was our last full day in Hawaii, and also happened to be my 26th birthday! It was absolutely amazing to have my birthday in paradise, on my honeymoon! I was on cloud nine all day.
We started my special day by stopping at this great bakery on the North Shore for breakfast sandwiches before heading to hike Oahu's largest volcanoe! Diamond Head is 800 feet tall, and we went all the way to the top! It was hot by time we got there because we had slept in again of course. However, the hike itself wasn't too extreme, just a little bit tiring. The view from the top was incredible and definetely worth it!
After our hike, we planned to go to Wakiki again for the day for lunch and to shop! We rewarded ourselves for our hard work that morning with lunch at a wonderful Sushi Restaurant called Doraku's at the Royal Hawaiian Shopping Center. It was the best sushi we both ever had, and we love sushi! Especially the volcano roll, so amazing! Then we shopped around quite a bit, at the Shopping Center and a large outdoor marketplace. We shopped so much, we actually decided we had to buy another suitcase to store things for the way home! My favorite souvonier was my birthday gift from Chris, he bought me a beautiful white gold necklace and pair of earrings in the shape of plumerias, Hawaii's state flower, with diamond accents in the center, from the shopping center's jeweler. I put them on immediately of course! They are just beautiful!
We had planned to do something very special for my Birthday Dinner that night, we were going on a luxury sunset dinner cruise around the island! Unfortunately, we got very lost on the way to the marina due to our GPS picking the wrong one, and almost missed our ship! The captain called us luckily, and was personally directing us! I was so thankful that he waited for us, especially considering it probably would have ruined my birthday to pay all that money just to miss out. The dinner cruise turned out to be amazing! The ship was engineered so that you could not feel any movement, and we really did not at all. We had a private table for 2 right next to the window, and enjoyed watching the island go by while enjoying our gourmet meal. It was a five course dinner! We each had some delicious fruity cocktails, a shrimp appetizer, hawaiian salad, whole lobster, filet mignon, and dessert! Everything was delicious! I had never had a whole lobster, only tails, but our waiter was happy to help us with how to eat it luckily! When they brought out dessert, mine had a candle and the staff all sang to me. After dinner, there was a live band and hawaiian dancers to enjoy and after we did that for a while we went out on the deck to enjoy the Hawaiian sunset and see Wakiki all lit up. For a while we were the only ones out there, and it was amazingly romanitc to sit under the stars together alone together and look out over the ocean. It was the most perfect birthday I could ever imagine, and will probably be the best one ever for me!
Honeymoon Day 8!
Today was the last day of our honeymoon, we were so sad that we had to leave paradise. We spent the whole day relaxing at our resort, Turtle Bay today, just wanting to unwind and enjoy Hawaii before our long journey back home. We ate at the hotel's delicious breakfast buffet again that morning, and then headed to the pool and beach for the day. We mostly just lounged and watched the surfers. The waves were huge once again! We had a late lunch at the pool restaurant, and finally by about 4 pm we had to face reality and get ready to leave.
The resort let us use the beautiful spa facilities to shower and change since we had already checked out of our cottage, which was nice. We packed up our Jeep one last time, and then headed back to the Honolulu Airport. We returned our Jeep and made it through security with plenty of spare time, so we decided to enjoy one last Hawaiian meal at the airport. We were so excited to find another location of the Kona Brewing Company right in our terminal! So thats where we ate, it was delicious once again. Once we got on our flight, we were happy we had eaten because since our flight was at around 9 pm, they were not serving dinner in First Class, only a late night snack. We each watched a movie while enjoying our fruit and cheese platters, and then went to sleep. We arrived in Seattle the next morning very early, and were still exhausted so we headed back to the first class lounge and took a nap on some couches. We had two more flights to take after that! We flew into New York City because the airline we took didn't fly into our local airport. So we had one more long cross country flight and a short one hour flight back home. I think we made it home finally at about midnight of the day following the day we had left with the time change! But it was defintely worth the long travel, it actually wasn't too bad at all. We both had the most amazing time in Hawaii and couldn't have asked for a more pefect honeymoon trip! I hope to be able to go back some day, I just cannot imagaine never being back there!
