Weddingbee Blog

Alright, where to start with describing our honeymoon? Amazing. Fantastic. Beautiful. And so. much. fun!

But I’ll try to keep these honeymoon recaps to just a couple posts, and make them picture-heavy so you can all see what we did, since I know seeing vacation pictures is a lot more fun than just reading about it!

It started early the Monday morning after our wedding, with us driving to the airport in a zombie-like state, exhausted from the previous week, and our plane took off on time. Not only was the 5 1/2 hour flight the longest I’d ever taken, but I had my first experience with actual airplane food! It was a semi-warm vegetarian breakfast burrito and muffin, and it was as I had expected—gross!

After an hour and a half layover on Oahu, we landed safely on Kauai, and got our rental car from Budget. Where we ended up paying twice the cost quoted on our reservation—yes, they talked Mr. Cola into an upgrade, the insurance, and the pre-paid gas. Oh well, it was our first car rental experience, and we definitely learned from it to get the insurance, but ignore the rest of their overzealous sales pitch. We just wanted to get to the beach!

Mr. C with our Jeep, just after we took the T-tops off. We had planned on a regular convertible, but at least we had plenty of room in this!

We took the gorgeous hour and fifteen minute drive up the coast to the north shore of the island, stopping along the way to pick up our rented snorkels, beach gear and groceries. Once we arrived at our beach house, we were blown away!

Our house, called the Kauai Love Shack, was everything we could have hoped for, and even better in person than any picture could describe! It was literally right on the beach (and Mr. Cola said the Dave Chapelle quote in this post title several times during the week too, in reference to our house location)!

The front of the house from the lawn

View from the front porch

View from the bed. There were gorgeous views just like this from the living room/dining room, kitchen and bathroom too!

We quickly dropped our things and walked the five steps outside to check out our beach before the late afternoon sun faded. It was so beautiful and private; the entire week we never saw more than about ten total people at any one time.

Just around the corner of the beach there was a small resort which we walked past several nights to see the sunset.

And there were a TON of different types of crabs on the beach to keep me entertained. Because, yes, just like a 7-year-old boy, I am easily entertained by animals and nature. Don’t believe me? I will even poke (what we think are) dead crabs with a stick, as documented in this silly video.

The next day we awoke to a beautiful sunrise without even getting out of bed, and spent the entire day on the beach in front of our house, just trying to recover from the crazy amount of activity the week of our wedding.

I highly recommend Bubba Mugs for keeping drinks cold on the beach, and the flip top lids are great for keeping the sand out too! (And notice, I’m wearing my robot tank top that I also wore in my boudoir pictures. Mr. Cola loved his present!)

That evening we walked down the beach to attend a luau at the Hanalei Colony Resort, and it was fantastic! It was put on by a family and their friends, and it was very intimate and entertaining. Great Hawaiian music, wonderful food, hula and fire dancers… so much fun!

The next day we drove out to Princeville and hiked down a canyon to snorkel at the Queen’s Bath. The Queen’s Bath is a pool formed in volcanic rock, and little fish get swept in it by the waves. You can only swim there on calm days though, if the seas are rough, waves can knock you off the rocks and pull you out to sea. Luckily we visited on a calm day!

Following our snorkel and hike back out of the canyon we ate lunch in town, and then went and checked out the historic Hanalei Bay Pier.

Then, after a nap and another afternoon on the beach we ate dinner at the Hanalei Dolphin restaurant, and my amazing HUSBAND (ah, still not used to calling him that!) bought me a beautiful lei.

While the first few days of our honeymoon were pretty relaxing, the middle part of our honeymoon was action packed!

On day four we drove all the way back down to the airport to go on a helicopter tour of the island. All the travel planning sites touted a helicopter tour as the only way to properly see the island, and I completely agree with them! Even Mr. Cola was stoked after our trip, and he wasn’t even very excited about it to begin with, because it is on the expensive side. For our ~65 minute tour around the whole island it was $458 for both of us, but well worth it in my opinion.

I think this next set of photos from our tour deserves a little mood music. We literally flew over a rainbow in the helicopter, although it didn’t really photograph very well up close.

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After taking off, our pilot told us some of the history of the island, and some neat tidbits on the many movies filmed on Kauai. In my opinion he did a great job of balancing informing us, with letting us enjoy the scenery in quiet. Also, Mr. Cola and I had the two best seats on the helicopter, in the front row, and there was a neat window near the floor on the front that we could look down through.

I’ll spare you the over 500 pictures I took on our tour, but here are a few of my favorites, starting with us in the helicopter!

One of probably over a hundred waterfalls we saw from the air. This is the falls featured in the Jurassic Park movie.

Flying over Waimea Canyon, aka the Grand Canyon of the Pacific.

Over the Na Pali coast. This coastline makes up about 1/5th of Kauai, and there are no roads along this entire stretch, so you can’t actually drive around the whole island.

The small bay in the middle of the below picture is Ke’e Beach, the further medium sized bay is Tunnels Beach, and the big bay at the top of the picture is Hanalei Bay. Our house was about half way between Hanalei and Tunnels, and we visited all of these beaches on our trip.

A closer view above our adorable beach house.

Wailua Falls from the air.

Posing with our helicopter. They recommend you wear dark clothing so you don’t see the reflection of what you’re wearing in the windows.

After our amazing helicopter ride, we decided to do a little sightseeing as we traveled the 1 1/4 hours back to our house. Here’s Mr. Cola by Wailua Falls that we had just flown over 20 minutes prior.

’Opeaka’a Falls.

We sampled the best pulled pork on the island for lunch at Scotty’s BBQ in Kappa’a, and then I had to go check out the palm trees on the beach!

On our way back after lunch we stopped at the Kilauea Lighthouse and the cliffs next to it, which is a seabird preserve.

That night we walked even further down the beach to see yet another beautiful sunset. But notice the dark clouds gathering…

We went from looking like this:

To this, in a matter of minutes!

In Kauai there are several daily showers, usually in the morning or early evening, and usually only sprinkles or misting for 5 minutes or less. Not a big deal, usually. But we happened to get caught in a massive dumping of the sky, and hiding under the sparse trees next to the beach wasn’t going to protect us! So we had to duck under one of the many empty, raised homes being built next to the beach to wait out the rain. It was quite hilarious actually, because we were soaked and stranded under a house, which we joked belonged to Craig T. Nelson.

[Ok, sidebar for an inside joke] Our helicopter pilot had mentioned Craig T. was a homeowner near where we were on the island, and when I was about 4 years old I’d had a big crush on him. I was convinced at the time that he wasn’t going to get any older, he was going to “wait for me”. So in our completely wet and dripping state, it was cracking us up to think we might be cowering under the home of my former star crush!

Anyway, after the rain ended about 10 minutes later, we came out of hiding and ate dinner at the resort down the road. They didn’t seem to mind that we were wet, for as much as it rains in Kauai, I’m sure we weren’t their first wet diners.

The next morning it was time to check out Tunnel’s beach, with has some of the best snorkeling on the island.

Later that night we had the best crab cakes of the trip at Postcards Cafe in Hanalei for dinner. (Sorry, I’m one of those people who likes to take pictures of yummy food!)

And they even give diners a postcard when you pay your bill!

Coming up next, the Na Pali coast from a boat, stalking sea turtles, and a bonus honeymoon day!

(all pictures in this post are personal photos)

P.S. If anyone would like more info about the house we stayed in, places we ate, tours we took, etc, please Private Message me. I’m a big fan of writing travel reviews, so I have a lot more details that I’m not going into here, including things like prices, detailed itineraries and driving directions and menu recommendations!