Headed to Kauai

Jackson's final 40th birthday trip finally arrived and we headed off for Kauai! MacKenzie would be spending a few weeks with her Grammy while we traveled.  

MacKenzie waiting on Grammy to get her
and to drop us off at the airport

We cashed in reward points so our flights cost us $5.60 each. Total. Roundtrip. Yes, accumulating points matters. USE A REWARDS CREDIT CARD!

Pretty excited!

Getting closer!

We made it! We flew Indianapolis to Denver, Denver to Honolulu then waited FOUR hours for a puddle-jumper over to Kauai. The long layover in Honolulu was the worst part. The flights were pretty easy! Anyway, we left early Saturday morning and still landed there at about 7 p.m. local time due to the time change. They are SIX hours behind Eastern time which really throws your body for a loop! We arrived in the evening so we knew our resort was large, but we had no idea how pretty it was until the sun finally came up the next day. We'd made it until about 9 local time before just crashing so we were up waiting for the sun the next morning. Only in Hawaii am I a morning person!

Seeing the resort for the first time with the
dawn's early light

The hotel's breakfast buffet had amazing views and amazing food!

Our hotel was hosting the Kauai marathon on Sunday so they told us to just stay close to the property to avoid the traffic. We were pretty tired from all the flying anyway so we happily obliged and spent the day exploring the property.

Since we were kind of trapped at the resort for the day (such a tough place to be stuck- ha!) we splurged for the $40 per person breakfast buffet. We were the first to arrive at the restaurant so we got the best table. The servers were amazing. They were SO friendly. We ate far too much food to try to justify the price to ourselves. We tried all the amazing fresh fruit, Kona coffee (YUM!), and fruit juices we could before giving up and calling ourselves full. We cashed in Hyatt points to stay all four night for free (we did not even have to pay the resort fee...winning!) so the breakfast's price was much more bearable.

I could get used to this view, for sure! 

Birthday boy! :) 

At our happiest: on a trip!

Showing off that Jackson shaved his beard

The hotel had this random schnauzer bench! LOVED IT!

Checking out the hotel's beach

The beginning of the Maha'ulepu Trail is right next to the hotel so we hopped on over to it and enjoyed some coastal scenes.

Petefish.

A view back to the resort

It got pretty warm out on the trail so we finished up and headed back to the hotel's lagoon. It was a really cool area to kind of get away from most of the other guests and relax.

An enjoyable beach read

The view from our room

We headed back up to the room to get cleaned up for dinner. We got to the area a little early so we went to see Kauai's "Spouting Horn" which is just a place where waves cause water to shoot up from between rocks. It was pretty.

Spouting Horn

RANDOM CHICKENS ROAM THE ENTIRE ISLAND

We then watched sunset at what was supposed to be the best place to see it on the island: the front of a high dollar restaurant. We paid $5 to valet our car so that we could just enjoy the sunset. It was the best idea ever!

We watched it rise and watched it set

Petefish.

HOW HANDSOME IS THIS GUY?!

Gorgeous

The fancy restaurant came highly recommended, but, alas, the Petefishes are cheap so we went for Mexican instead. It was FANTASTIC! We had such an awesome day exploring Kauai. What an awesome island!