Live Aloha!

Tonight I am so excited to bring you the first in my Hawaii Life posts! These will be all about my recent trip to the Beautiful state of Hawaii and will be kicking off a new posting series on my blog called Travel Thursdays.

Let me just start by saying that Hawaii is amazing!
We stayed 6 days on the Big Island, Kona coast, and 2 days 1 night on Ohau, Waikiki Beach. I feel like we conquered the Big Island. We drove around as much as we could without driving into an active lava flow, saw 1/3 of the island by helicopter, and explored every small town we passed! Here are the treasures we found during our many day trips around the Big Island...

**Just so you know this is not in order of how we did things on our trip, but I tried to group similar activities together**

The Hawaiian Vanilla Company factory is a gem of a find on the Big Island. It is the only vanilla factory in the Islands, and it smelled amazing here. It is a full vanilla farm and they give tours to show how the beans are harvested. We didn't get to go on a tour, but we looked around the farm and shop and got the most amazing fresh vanilla bean ice cream. They partner with a local dairy farm and have them infuse their vanilla beans into their ice cream. It was the BEST vanilla ice cream I've ever had! I love shopping local.

I loved these doors leading into the shop, they were huge and heavy and had the coolest details on them like those door handles! 

The shop was adorable and they had the most delicious smelling products, everything from pancake mixes, to teas, lotions, body scrubs, and even BBQ sauce! We of course grabbed a few bottles of vanilla extract and I got this amazing body lotion that smells heavenly. 

They had these beauties everywhere. They are so cool. It's like a cactus mixed with a rose.

For my Birthday I decided I wanted to hike some waterfalls around the Island and to visit the famous Waipio Valley. We decided on Akaka Falls and the lookout for the Waipio Valley. Both were absolutely gorgeous and the views were breath taking.

The Mr. and I at the Akaka falls lookout.

The falls are 442 ft tall and legend says that they are named after Chief Akaka. He fell to his death from them after being caught cheating on his wife with another woman. There is a large red rock at the bottom of the pools that legend says he turned into when he fell from the falls. The nearby Kahuna falls is said to be his mistress and the large rocks at the top of the falls are said to be his wife and dog watching down on him. Kind of a sad story... But the falls were gorgeous! And they were a super easy hike as well. So don't count them out if you aren't wanting anything too strenuous.


What says Hawaii More than Sunsets on the beach? We had ample opportunity to take in this Hawaiian experience almost nightly! Growing up on the East coast you get to see the Sunrise over the ocean any morning you feel like waking up at 6am. But there is something so spectacular about watching the sun go down into the ocean!

 The quintessential Hawaiian Sunset... Don't you think? I have a hundred pictures of this, it was so hard to choose just one. But I loved this palm tree. I wish there was a way to put sound with pictures because one of my favorite things about the ocean is the sound of the breeze going through the palm trees.

While on the Big Island we explored several local beaches. One of my favorites was Hapuna Beach State Park. It was a shell sand beach and was long and wide and not very crowded. The water wasn't as warm as the Atlantic that I'm used to but it was very refreshing on the hot June day! We spent the whole morning here one day just taking in the sights and sounds of the ocean. Not a care in the world eating macadamia nuts and relaxing to the sounds of the waves. Ah vacation.... You bring such peace to my soul!

 This beach was particularly cool because it had all these fun rock formations on either end of it, and on one end there was actually a natural cave you could get into when the tide was low enough. So fun. I kind of expected to find Narnia inside of it... I still loved the tidal pools and lava rocks though.

 One of my most favorite places we went while on the big Island was the Lava Lava Beach Club. This place was perfect in every way. It is an all open air restaurant right on the beach. At night they have local musicians come in and do a mix of hawaiian, reggae and top 40 songs. The picture above and on the right is our view from our table one night. (It was so good we had to go twice!) They served everything from Barbecue ribs (AMAZING) to the fresh catch of the day, I had the Mahi Mahi, It was exquisite. The atmosphere was so casual and comfortable and the wait staff was all so laid back. They bring you your check in a childrens book instead of a normal black check folder. You could take a marker and write a message about your experience or to your waiter over the pages of the book. It was such a fun and unique dining experience that I am already craving being back home!

 Since I can't be sitting on the beach there I'll just have to settle for my satellite radio to bring me the hits from my favorite Hawaiian radio station that is all to blame for this trip, 93.1 Da Pa'ina.

Stay tuned for the rest of my Hawaii Life posts!

XOXO
The Mrs.