2025 Family Hawaii Trip: Part I (Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday)

[dorchadas]

We spent the week leading up to the new year in Hawai'i this year! We've been planning this for months, though originally we didn't know if it was going to happen at all. My sister wanderluster_kp lives in Honolulu and has for a few years now, but I've never gotten to go before--my family has been going to Hawai'i on and off for decades at this point, ever since Poppa and Gramma Kay would rent a house there, but for various reasons I've never gotten to go. Now's my chance.


Tuesday
Tuesday was mostly just on the plane. We originally were going to head out to my parents' house the previous day, then that became the previous night when I had to spend extra time getting Laila's medicine and when sashagee had a crown fall out and needed emergency dentistry, and then that became the next morning when her crown replacement was from 4:30 p.m. to 6:30 p.m. and taking the train would have gotten us out to my parents' house just in time to go to bed, so we just went to bed instead. We woke up at 5:40 a.m., walked to the bus and took the bus to the Blue Line, took the Blue Line to the airport, and met my parents at the terminal and then boarded the plane for a 9:30 a.m. flight!

It's a nine and a half hour flight and we had a four-year-old and I had a bit of a cold, and it turned out that the Bluey headphones my parents bought for Laila had an internal volume limiter to prevent the user from turning it up too loud and damaging their hearing. Very sensible under normal circumstances, but in this case, it means that given the noise of the airplane, Laila basically couldn't hear any of the shows she was trying to watch, and she'd watch for ten minutes and then take the headphones off and wiggle around. Trying a Bluey coloring book or reading her a story didn't fare much better, so it was nine and a half hours of telling her to stop climbing out of her seat, stop kicking the seat in front of her, sit down, and just generally chill out because we had so much of the flight left to go. This was not helped by the fact that on this nine and a half hour flight, they fed us breakfast immediately after takeoff and then no other meals at all, just a single snack at the halfway point. I had a couple snack bars with me but they were extremely stale, so neither Laila nor sashagee wanted to eat them.

What I'm trying to say was, it was a nightmare.

I felt better around the six hour mark, when even the kids who had been peacefully watching Bluey--so much Bluey watching--for the first few hours had hit their limit and started squirming and whining, but there really wasn't any release until we finally landed in Honolulu at 6:58 p.m. our time, 2:58 local time. After picking up our luggage, slightly delayed because of a baggage jam, we went outside and were met by wanderluster_kp, who picked us up and took us to her apartment where we would be staying for the next week. Laila was extremely excited to see her cool world-traveling aunt--knowing that was why we were on the plane might have been the only thing that kept her going, to be honest--and immediately jumped into her arms when she saw her. From this point, it was much smoother sailing, and after dropping off our luggage and giving Laila a gigantic welcome present in the form of a Bluey playset that had basically every single character in Bluey:

...we walked over to the nearby Ala Moana shopping center to get some food in everyone.

We went to Foodland, which wanderluster_kp described as "the Whole Foods of Hawai'i," and everyone picked out what they wanted. I went to the poke station and got some fresh spicy ahi poke and a seaweed salad from the nearby pickled items area:

...which was absolutely delicious, though the Take A Number style of ordering and the absolute no-nonsense demeanor of the woman behind the counter did throw me for a loop, and I just got the fish and rice without any other toppings like edamame or any seaweed. I did hear a memorable quote while I was waiting for my number to be called, though:

Tourist: "Why is this fish so expensive?"
Counter Lady: slight pause, steel-eyed glare "It's fresh."

I also bought a blueberry cheesecake, but didn't end up eating it because the poke and seaweed filled me up. We were fading pretty fast after dinner, and after putting Laila to bed neither sashagee nor I lasted much longer. We went to bed at 8 p.m.--midnight body clock time--and I stayed up reading for a bit but eventually fell asleep.



Wednesday
The next day began very early as Laila woke up at 4:30 a.m. and refused to go back to sleep, so sashagee woke up with her while I slept in. I woke up around 8:30 a.m. when she came in and told me people were thinking of going to the beach, so I showered, got dressed, and walked out just in time to leave with everyone to the beach, a short five minute walk from wanderluster_kp's apartment:

I wasn't feeling super well, so I mostly sat under a tree in the shade with Nana, but sashagee and Laila ran all over the place, ran in and out of the small pond that had been built--presumably by the nearby hotel--and built castles in the sand:

We were there for about an hour before Laila ran out of steam and wanted to go home, so at that point we packed up and left. I was feeling a bit better and Poppa (Laila's, not mine) and Nana offered to watch Laila for a while, so I suggested--well, to be honest it was a bit more like badgered--sashagee into walking a mile with me to go to Coco Ichibanya, a Japanese curry chain I used to frequently eat at but which has American stores only in California, Texas, and...Hawai'i.

We walked out of wanderluster_kp's apartment, and went the opposite direction of the beach, across the river and further into town, to the McCully Shopping Center where we found that basically everything was closed because, despite the 21º weather and azure sky, it was of course actually December 24th. We went upstairs to the second floor where there was a Hiroshima themed izakaya called Carp Dori (カープ通り, "Carp Street"), which was also closed, and an anime goods start called Akiba where sashagee bought a token for use in the gacha machine and badgered me into buying a Kirby blind box (it had a cute display with Kirby and Waddle Dee sleeping under a tree). We kept looking around a bit and finally found a place that was open, a Hawai'ian fast casual place called Oh My Grill, and ate there. sashagee got the teriyaki cheeseburger--which I'd been suggesting to her ever since I wondered whether the McDonald's on the island had pineapple burgers--and I got the loco moco, eggs over hamburgers in gravy over rice:

I looked up the origin of the dish and it's the most American thing ever. It was invented by a group of Japanese-American teenagers based on the classic Japanese hamburg steak. The name loco came from one of the teenagers, whose nickname was "crazy," filtered through another one who was studying Spanish. They added moco because it rhymed and sounded nice, and now it's traditional Hawai'ian food. It was really good, but so filling I could barely finish it.

We left and walked back home, where we had a bit of time to rest before we went with the rest of the family back to the shopping center and Foodland. Despite the lovely weather fooling our Chicago selves, tomorrow was December 25th and thus basically everything would be closed, so we needed enough food for dinner tonight, three meals tomorrow, and breakfast on the 26th. sashagee and I did some planning but it was foiled by Laila's...well, let's say exuberance. She was misbehaving and so as punishment, we went and stood outside and she didn't get to shop while Poppa and Nana and Mama all did. sashagee got me some maguro sashimi and a seaweed salad. When everyone paid and left, we stopped in at Nijiya Market, a Japanese grocery store, and bought some dango for dessert, a salmon bentō for me, a ton of tsukemono, sakuramochi, and some other delicious treats. On the way back, we stopped in to ABC, a local convenience store, for sashagee to get new sandals since the other new sandals that she had gotten were hurting her feet. While there, we found some Hawai'i exclusive Sanrio goods:

Gude vibes only.

After we ate dinner it was pretty late, so we put Laila to bed, sat around and chatted for a bit, and then sashagee and I went to bed.



Thursday
Thursday morning began inauspiciously as Laila's white noise machine ran out of batteries at 3 a.m.--apparently the charge brick that I had brought was no good. That unfortunately meant that she woke up, and even more unfortunately that she didn't go back to sleep. I had to stay up with her for four hours, singing to her, stopping her from kicking the wall, making sure she didn't run out and cause all kinds of problems, tucking her back in, and otherwise trying to get her to fall back asleep. Multiple times she would lie down, her breathing would slow, she would pause for a few minutes, and then she would jerk awake and start flailing around again, obviously in an attempt to stop herself from falling asleep. By the time 7 a.m. rolled around I was already exhausted, but I followed her out to the main room and kept an eye on her until sashagee woke up, whereupon I went back and took a shower and got myself into some semblance of presentability.

We didn't do much before lunch since nearly everything was closed, but after lunch we went straight to the beach, which had lovely weather for December 25th:

We sat down next to The Most Canadian Man Ever. I don't know about his opinion on maple syrup or hockey, but he did having the lilting accent that Americans (like me) associate with Canada and ended every single question he asked us with "eh?" We talked to him a bit about the weather differences in our home--we came from record snowfall and -10ºC, he came from -20ºC in western Canada--before Poppa came and told us that I didn't need to hold the umbrella anymore, further down the beach was a spot with a lot less wind where the umbrella could just be planted in the ground, so we moved.

I spent a bit of time in the new spot putting on some sunscreen and chased Laila around while sashagee and wanderluster_kp built sandcastles. Laila's main contribution was occasionally coming back and destroying them, but they still managed some pretty impressive constructions considering how little time they had:

You can see Poppa here lending some engineering expertise.

Laila kept roaming around the beach, finding pretty girls to hand a rock to before asking them to throw it in the water and thus charming them with how adorable she was. Only a couple of them took her up on it, but it didn't stop her from trying. This continued for a while, while the others managed to finally build a sandcastle that didn't collapse immediately (but which still half-collapsed after a couple minutes before Laila finished it off), until Laila declared she was "all done" and we packed up to go back to wanderluster_kp's apartment. But before we did that, we stopped in at Dave's Ice Cream for some shaved ice. Poppa was paying so he made sure we all got an underlayer of toasted macadamia nut ice cream. I got dragonfruit and guava shaved ice. Dragonfruit didn't really taste like much except sweetness--I had the same problem with fresh papaya now that I've had it; it's fine but the flavor isn't really that strong--but the guava shaved ice was delicious.

After that we went home. I still had a bunch of space I needed to fill on my Exercise rings, though, so I went out for a walk toward the Ala Moana shopping center, around it, and back. It took about an hour, and I didn't see that many people out and about--basically every store in the shopping center was closed--but I did see some crowds at least:

After an hour's walk along the mostly-empty streets, I arrived back at the apartment just in time for dinner. I had my salmon bentō, Poppa and Nana had chicken and vegetables, and Laila had a bunch of different things, pineapple and inarizushi and pickles and seaweed. We ate dinner, Laila watched some Bluey and "choochoo trains," and then we gave her a bath to wash the rest of the sand and salt off of her, and put her bed. And since we had both been up since 3 a.m. and sashagee had only gotten a couple extras hours of sleep after that, we went to bed as well. I meant to stay up and read for a couple hours, but I fell asleep on my iPad and woke up again at 11:30 p.m., so I packed everything away and went to bed for real.