Ready...Set...GO! HAWAII Trip-Day 1

People have asked why we decided to vacation in Hawaii, with our kids no less. Neither Travis or I had ever been to Hawaii so it's always been something we wanted to do. When we were driving home from Disneyland last May, Travis told me that our next vacation was going to be to Hawaii. Whether he was serious or not, I don't know, but I took him serious!!! I knew I wanted it to be a "Family Vacation" and that I wanted our kids to come. I also asked my parents to go with us too. Everything just worked out right!

So February 12th was the big day, the day we were leaving to go to HAWAII!! We were all so excited. Lainey came in our bedroom that morning at 6 a.m. wanting to know if it was time to get up yet. February 12th was a Friday and we were leaving later that morning. We decided to let the girls stay home from school that day since they would've of only been there for a couple of hours anyway. I had started packing earlier in the week so everything was basically ready to go. I ran up to the grocery store to buy some snacks and while I was gone, Travis loaded everything on and into our vehicle. My parents came and he loaded their stuff too. Around 11:30 a.m. we were all ready to go. On the way to Vegas (that's where we flew from), we stopped at Subway in Mesquite for lunch. Our flight was scheduled for 5:05 pm (Vegas time) and we made it to the airport around 2 pm. Travis dropped us off and then took our vehicle over to his cousin's house. She brought him back to the airport. While we were waiting for Travis, I looked and noticed that our flight was delayed until 6:55 pm. Uggghhh.....I'm glad we were so excited about going to Hawaii that the flight delay didn't really matter. When Travis got back to the airport, we checked in with our airline and then went through security. We went and found a place to set and then waited for about 4 hours. The wait wasn't bad. The girls did homework and Cooper kept up busy. Finally it was time. We loaded onto the plane. I sat by Travis with Cooper and Brielle and Lainey sat by each other. I'm not a big fan of flying, but it wasn't bad. Probably because it was dark and I couldn't see anything. Travis watched a movie on his computer, the girls watched movies on their iPods and slept and I held Cooper because he fell asleep right after take-off. We were fed dinner on the plane. It was a ham and cheese sandwich and a delicious brownie. We got lots of beverages too. It was about a 6 hour flight. We were all excited when we saw lights and knew we were finally in HAWAII!! It was about 10:50 pm (Hawaii time) when we landed. We got our luggage and Travis found a phone and called our rental car company. They told us to go out side and find their shuttle. We waited for about 15 minutes, but the shuttle finally showed up. The driver was really nice. We got our van and headed to our hotel. I had printed directions off of MapQuest and they weren't the greatest. We drove A LOT. We weren't aware, but there are a lot of one-way streets in Honolulu. We were driving and decided that we weren't heading the right way to our hotel. So Travis pulls into a parking lot so he can turn around and go back a different way. Well, we are getting ready to pull out of the parking lot and a car behind us starts honking at us. We weren't sure what his problem was so we just pull out and start driving. As we're driving we hear a lot of honking and yelling. We soon realized that we were driving the wrong way on a one-way street. It was crazy. I'm so glad it was 12:00 am and there weren't very many cars. Anyways, somehow, we finally found our hotel, the Hale Koa. We checked in around 12:30 pm and finally got to bed around 1:00 am (that's 4 am Utah time by the way). We slept really well!!

Lainey's birthday is February 20th. She wanted a camera so that's what she got. We gave it to her the day we left for Hawaii so she could take her own pictures on our trip.

The Fam right before we left for Vegas. We were so EXCITED!!!

The kiddos waiting at the airport in Vegas.