I think your trip report followers would be very interested in reading about your next Utah trip! Utah's uniqueness makes it especially interesting in its own way! If anyone reading this agrees that you'd enjoy a Utah trip report from @GrandCalifornian , I hope you will either "like" this post, or post your own comment about this! It would fit great in the "California and the West" section of this forum.
Ahhh, and you also have the Utah trip coming up very soon! Have a great time there!
Are you saying you like Aulani more than Copper Creek? Is Wilderness Lodge still your favorite building anywhere?
You are just such a fun family, thank you for taking us along with you!!
Yeah, we would like to explore Hawaii some more, and even feel that we would like to repeat an Oahu only trip since there is so much to see and do there, and now we are familiar with it. Eventually other islands will be neat to see too.Since you live approximately equidistant between Hawaii and WDW, I can see future Hawaii trips in your future. We loved island hopping since each of them had their own special features.
Yeah, I'm sure it would be great. The Luau we did was surprisingly educational and included a lot of information about the other places besides Hawaii, but it would be fun to see the Disney version next time.I bet Aulani would have a great show.
Yes they can, even though most of our travel could have been done with any rental car it was more fun to have the unique Jeep experience. Next time we will take one off road some more.
Yeah, we loved the size and floor plan of the room. We still love Copper Creek for the overall resort and location, but the bigger room and having the door from the master to the living room was really nice.That was a really nice room. A king bed is a big plus, too.
Thanks for joining in and commenting. We definitely love our WDW trips, but this was a perfect way to do something a little different yet a little bit the same. We are glad you enjoyed the pictures, and love sharing something new. We will share more adventures soon, and are already planning for the next WDW one.
That is a neat idea. Sometime we look forward to vacationing in Florida beyond WDW. Our immediate problem is our next trips will be shorter than we are used to due to work time limitations, so we may not want to spend much time away from WDW itself. Eventually it is definitely on the list though, and I'm sure we would love it.
I'm sorry I didn't get to see and reply to this sooner, but I hope you have a great trip starting today! Aloha! It sounds like it will be a great trip, we sure enjoyed ours. The Jeep should be great, and there is so much to do for kids of all ages. It should be a neat family vacation. We hope you have a great time, and let us know how it goes.
Thanks, so do we. It shows the beautiful Lanikai beach which was the sort of experience we hoped to have in Hawaii.
Thanks! We are looking forward to Utah in a couple weeks. It will be a shorter trip this year, but will keep our 20 plus year tradition going. Usually we spend most of our time off roading in OHVs, but this time we are just going to camp and hang out for a few days. It should be great though, and we will see what we can write up about it.
We have never made it that far East in our Utah exploration. There is a similar coffee place and German bakery outside of Carmel Junction near Zion that we enjoy. Sadly a lot of the small businesses like that are having trouble getting labor post COVID, now that the visitors have returned. We love supporting unique little places like that.
No, we loved the particular 1 bedroom layout at Aulani more, but overall Copper Creek is still our favorite resort and place. WDW is an awesome location, and still much more of a destination than what Disney has to offer at Aulani. Both are very different places to vacation, and we really enjoyed both and will repeat both in the future. On a resort vs resort basis, Copper Creek and Wilderness Lodge still reigns supreme for us, even though the room at Aulani was nicer for us.
Thank you so much! We love re-living our trips and having a written record of them to look back on. Congratulations on your upcoming trip, it should be great. I'm not sure how "fun" we are but we sure do have a good time doing what we enjoy, and then writing about it. Thanks for joining in, and we'll see you on the next one.I know it's probably been said, but I absolutely adore your writing style! You make me want to go back and read all your trip reports......have to make that happen, that'll get me even more in the mood for our WDW trip next month
Aww Thanks!I also think you guys are fun!
We had a great time in Utah. It was a shorter trip than usual but we still had a lot of fun, and we think we will share a write up of it. We'll post a link here once we kick it off.
Awesome! Looking forward to reading it!
I think they already posted their "final thoughts" on Hawaii, above.Would love to hear your "final thoughts" on Hawaii and how your Utah trip went
We hope to get it started this week. It was a short trip but a fun one.
Yeah, we think we summed up what we had to say for Hawaii. We enjoyed it more than we thought we would, and we will definitely do it again, likely focusing on Oahu again and exploring from Aulani. It is a great resort but for us wouldn’t be a “in the bubble” singe destination for a future trip. There’s so much to see on Oahu that we’d love to explore some more. Feel feee to let us know if you have any questions on what we thought of specific aspects of the trip or resort.Would love to hear your "final thoughts" on Hawaii and how your Utah trip went
Yeah, we wrapped it up and shared a summary, but we’re always open to talk about our past trips. Discussing Utah in more depth will be new and different but is something we are looking forward to.I think they already posted their "final thoughts" on Hawaii, above.
Congratulations, you should have a great trip. Yes, the hotel pictured in the start of that post is the Waikiki Banyon, which is where we parked for our hotel across the streets. That was the view from our balcony of the parking garage and pool area of the Banyon resort. It looked like a neat place to stay, with nice parking and a very tall tower.
Yay, we had a great time. Our next adventure to share is ready to post, so here it is, hop on over and check out something totally different, and a little sandy:
I’m enjoying the trip report before I head to Hawaii next week. I really feel for your daughter and the can collection. That’s the sort of thing I would have done as a child. I also hate it when housekeeping picks up rubbish that’s not in the trash can. I often reuse plastic bags, plastic bottles, etc. a couple of times on a trip to save waste and have had housekeeping remove those items too. Once at BCV I actually went to reception and complained and asked for replacement bags. I’d had the plastic grocery bags carefully tucked away next to the ziploc bags and other items on the counter so I could reuse the bags on groceries when transferring for a split stay (to avoid spills/leaks) - and they took them! As I said to reception, they’re only single use plastics if you’re limited to a single use!When we left off, we had just finised lunch at Costco and were headed off in search of a beach. Kathy recommended the East side of the island, and I was up for a drive so off we went.
This time instead of going along the coast we cut across the middle of the island.
I’d like to be honest here, we did very little research for this trip and I had no idea what to expect.
I knew it would be beautiful but the drive was just amazing and so breathtaking.
We basically followed the GPS and took highway 61 over the mountain. As we climbed it got prettier and prettier.
On the other side of the hill, we went through a tunnel and then had a beautiful view of the other side of the island.
We pulled over at the turnout for the Mauanawili trail and got to overlook the coast and look back on the mountain.
We also made some chicken friends, they were all over the place. The kids loved seeing them.
We had heard about wild chickens, but they always amused us. Once we took some more pictures, we headed down the hill in search of the beach.
We were headed for Lanikai beach which Kathy had been to a couple days before and said would be perfect for the kids. We drove around and found a place to park. Parking here is super tough, it kinda reminds me of some of our beaches here in California where there’s street parking only.
Exactly, we were driving through a neighborhood and looking for street parking where we wouldn;t block anybody's driveway. We circled around a couple of times and found a spot about half a block from a beach access walkway. We grabbed our things and made the short walk to the beach.
Once we saw the water, I was impressed. It was a neat shade of blue, and there was sandy beach as far as you could see with islands in the distance.
It was my favorite beach, and was just beautiful.
When I say this beach was like a postcard I mean it felt like we walked into a postcard dream world. It was a gorgeous beach on a beautiful day.
The kids goal was to get to swim in the waves, and they were perfect here. They were big enough to swim in without breaking near the shore or being too tall.
The water was pretty shallow too and they just had a ball going in and out of the water and playing in the sand.
The water was nice and warm, and it was easy to get into and swim. The kids made a sand turtle like they had seen on Waikiki.
We hung out on the beach and watched the kids play for quite a while. We snacked on chips and watermelon and just soaked it all in.
\It very much felt like a vacation at this point.
Yes, after a few days of deadlines and running around, we had time to just sit on the beach, and irt was a beautiful one at that.
After we soaked up all we could of the sand and sun and salt water we decided to do some more adventuring and drive down the coast.
We walked back to the Jeep and proceeded to fill it woth sand from our shoes and towels from the beach. We stopped by another 7-11 and got drinks, including another boba can for Allie.
This one was brown sugar, which wasn't anybody's favorite but still wasn't bad.
We drove for a bit until we all needed a bathroom. We stopped at Waimanalo Beach park where there were some bathrooms and kids at football practice.
It was a nice little city park, right on the beautiful shoreline. The bathrooms were fine, but were inhabited already by some pretty large rats.
They stayed in the rafters, but were kind of creepy.
It was not the best place for a bathroom but it did the job. I just kept my eyes on the rats and got out of there pretty quick.
The beach portion was pretty nice, with bigger breaking waves near the shore.
Marshall ran over to check out the playground, and immediately joined in whatever game the kids there were playing.
He makes friends really fast. After we tore him away from his new bffs we hit the road again.
We continued South along the shoreline past the Sea Life park where the luau was the night before, then stopped at Makapu'u Lookout to take some more pictures and generally play tourists.
It was up fairly high on the cliffs above the shore, and had a great view to the South and East.
It was another beautiful lookout and we enjoyed the view.
We stopped at another turnout that overlooked Hawaii Kai as we worked our way back to the North.
Paul was headed to the Costco in Hawaii Kai looking for a drone.
I figured since there was another Costco just off the highway we could stop in and check it out. We were also looking for dinner options, and found a Raising Cane's in the Costco parking lot, and decided to make it a one stop shop. I ran in to Costco unsupervised, and found that they had two drones in stock to choose from.
After a quick text to my loving and supportive wife, I grabbed one and checked out.
He was so excited! There’s no way I was going to stand in the way of that joy.
It was a good deal on a nice little drone that is a nice compliment to my larger ones I have at home.
We then had dinner at Cane's, which is something we enjoy at home too.
It rounded out a day of fairly economical dining.
It’s nice to have home comfort food on vacation. It also helped with budget for the trip in general.
Yeah, one nice thing about not being in the Disney bubble for the whole trip was we could eat more economically, and we still got food that we all enjoyed. The Hawaii Kai area is really nice, and probably was my favorite part of the island. If money were no object, I'd love a nice house on the water there with a neat boat dock out back. Hey, you gotta have dreams.
Within a few days I already had a favorite area for a house. That's ok, I have better taste than budget.
We then continued towards the hotel and saw the sunset as we drove.
We circled around the neighborhood a little bit and noticed the big crowds of people leaving the beach area for the day. It amazes me how many people were all around Waikiki.
It was pretty busy around the hotel but we finally ended up going the right way down the one way street.
We made it back to the room and here is where Allies boba can collection gets tragic.
She had kept the cans from each boba drink, and had them all lined up on the shelf by the TV.
The housekeeper had thrown them away when she came to clean the room. Allie was in tears that her collection was gone.
It was kind of sad, but they were basically trash. That was not what Allie wanted to hear though, and the only way to console her was to agree to purchase cans of all the flavors of tea again so that she would have a complete set.
It was hard to console her and not laugh at the same time, because the housekeeper did in fact clean up the trash that she left on the table.
Yeah, it was a case where one person's trash was another's treasure... Oh well, she was able to laugh about it a little later, and it meant she got more boba, which had to be a good thing, right?
I think so. Yeah luckily she found the humor in the situation pretty quickly and she didn’t pout for too long.]
We spent the rest of the night starting to pack up and then we went to bed before too late. It was a super day of exploring Hawaii, and I'm so glad we had the extra day before heading up to Aulani.
It was a perfect day. Coming up we FINALLY see Aulani and have a super surprise for the kids.
Check out our Friday adventures in the next update.
I agree that hotel staff should only remove your items if you had already put them in the wastebasket. I have heard at least one hotel say they follow this policy! If an item is not in the wastebasket, the housekeeper has no way to know if you meant to keep it, so they should leave it alone.
