DATE: Friday, December 16, 2022

T-6 days!

After a couple of years of saving up for, and months of planning, the 8 of us will be off to Hawaii! With Zach coming up on his last semester of college and soon off to start his own life, we wanted to do something very special for a vacation one last time as a family. We have all been anxiously awaiting this trip and it’s almost finally here!

My time in the Navy allowed me to live on Oahu for about four years from 1994 to 1998. Planning for this trip really opened my eyes to what all these islands have to offer and how much I missed while I was there, while single in my 20’s. I’m really looking forward to returning and reminiscing about my time there and sharing those experiences with my family.

Our overall itinerary includes flying into Honolulu and staying for about four days on Oahu, flying to the big island of Hawai’i for four days, then back to Oahu for about three more days. We’ll be staying in three AirBnB rentals for the almost two weeks we’ll be there. I’ve got quite a few things planned for the family and there will be a lot to do while we’re there. I have a friend who lives on the big island that I’ve kept in touch with over the years who helped us plan our stay on that island while we’re there.

As you can imagine, planning for a trip like this for 8 people was (and still is) somewhat stressful. The cost of the trip is the obvious source of anxiety. But beyond that, the planning of the trip didn’t come without any headaches along the way.

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There are four active volcanos on the big island of Hawai’i: Mauna Loa, Kilauea, Hualalai, and Mauha Kea. On November 27, 2022, Hawai’i’s largest volcano, Mauna Loa started erupting, which caused some concern for us, knowing that we had plans to visit that island. However, on December 15th, the volcano stopped erupting. It doesn’t sound like life was too disrupted on the island past the temporary inconveniencing of having some roads closed for safety purposes. (I could be wrong about that.) With respect to the volcano, it looks like we’re in the clear.

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The second cause for concern, which had me primarily worried, was the reports coming out of Hawaii about the rental car shortages. During the COVID pandemic in 2020, most rental car companies had to sell off their fleet in order to stay afloat. Second, post-COVID automotive supply, with supply chain disruptions and chip shortages, has been a big problem for a couple of years now causing the supply of rental cars to be low worldwide. Couple these with rising inflation and costs of tourism, especially on Hawaii during December/January, and we knew that the cost to rent vehicles was going to be high. Ideally, we would have liked to rent a vehicle for all 8 of us to travel together in, but this wasn’t possible. So we had to rent two 4-person cars. As of last week, it looks like our reservations are being held, but there’s always a possibility of this isn’t the case once we arrive. If it doesn’t, I’ve investigated The Bus public transit system as an alternative.

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Finding cost-effective places for 8 people to stay in Hawaii is no small feat. The plan was to stay at AirBnB rentals. My best shot at finding the best options was to place our reservations for three places to stay several months in advance. The reservations for the three places went very smoothly, as they usually do for me with AirBnB. However, on November 30th, I got a notification from AirBnB that our third reservation had to be cancelled because of a “quality issue with the host”. My reservation was automatically canceled and money was immediately refunded. But that left us without a place to stay for our last leg of our trip with only a month to book another place. Luckily I was successful, but not without shelling out an additional $800 compared to our original reservation.

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By far the most stressful part of planning this vacation was purchasing the airline tickets. I personally travel quite a bit for work. Over the past few years however, I have not flown that often. When I do fly it is usually paid for by the company, so while we are asked to keep those flight costs as low as we can, I’m still not that accustomed to monitoring airline ticket prices and purchasing them as the exact right time to get the best deal. Before purchasing our tickets (round-trip tickets from Indy to Honolulu and Honolulu to Hilo, for all 8 of us, in December – the highest demand time of the year), I’d researched when the absolute best time it would be to purchase our tickets from several different sources: CheapAir, Today, CNTraveler, Expedia, Momondo, FareCompare. None of them had a silver-bullet formula for when to purchase our tickets. They didn’t even have a solid consensus on when to purchase, so I chose to somehow combine the advice of all of these sites. Taking into consideration all of their recommendations, I’d narrowed it down to one week when it would be the best deal. Previous to that time, I watched the prices continue to climb. That week came and went and the prices still kept climbing. Seeing the handwriting on the wall, I bit the bullet and pulled the trigger. In the end, what I paid for the tickets was about 60% higher than what I’d budgeted for. But it’s okay kids, there are plenty of geckos and sand to eat while we’re there.

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Now, finally having all of the planning out of the way and the bulk of the trip paid for has allowed me personally to relax a bit and get excited to return to the islands. It’s a daily thing for us to mention the trip several times throughout the day. Vivian especially is very excited to go to Hawaii, even though I’m pretty sure she has no idea what that actually means.

I’ll be sure and do my best to write about our trip. It will be fun to share it.

Aloha!