Aulani,  Chraela,  Chraela Honeymoon - Feb 2018,  Disney,  In My Life,  Travel,  Wedding

Our Honeymoon – Day 6 – Aloha Aulani!

This is post #6 in my series all about our honeymoon! If you haven’t already, make sure you read the other posts first – they’re listed chronologically here 🙂

DAY 6 – THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 8

After a completely jam-packed last day on the Big Island, it was time for us to move on to our final island destination: Oahu! And we were SO excited because moving to Oahu meant it was finally time to check in to Disney Aulani!!

We woke up refreshed after a good night’s sleep and ready for another exciting day. I don’t know why I took this photo of our bed but I did so here you go:

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Goodbye beautiful room! After checking out of our hotel we were off to our breakfast destination, a local place called Ken’s House of Pancakes.

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While I love going to fancy upscale restaurants on vacation, there’s something special about the small locally-owned places as well. It was a precious little diner with a very homey feel.

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I enjoyed the eclectic art choices, like this poster of birds above my head.

We also quickly learned that this was more than the house of just pancakes, as evidenced by the HUGE menu…

It went on for pages!! I was overwhelmed!! For our last breakfast in Hilo Chris got an omelette with rice and I got pancakes with a side of toast. It turns out that our eyes were much bigger than our stomachs because LOOK AT ALL OF THIS FOOD:

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In case you can’t tell it was SO MUCH FOOD. Those pancakes were the size of my face. Everything was so good though!! They even had a cute little set of assorted syrups special for Valentine’s Day:

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The flavors were mango, strawberry and coconut!

Everything was delicious but we filled up quickly because, again…so much food. Soon after we finished it was time to get on our way back to the airport and return our rental car. We did slightly overestimate how much time we would need to do those things so we ended up waiting for a little while at the airport, but it was the cute, themed airport so we didn’t mind.

I also got to juice up my phone with my lovely Away suitcase! #NotSponsored

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After a while it was finally time to get on the plane!!

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The flight was quick and painless and soon we were landing in Honolulu!! The airport was so pretty – I swear everything in Hawaii is prettier!!

We had a little trouble getting our rental car because there was a long line, but eventually we finally got it. Then it was finally time to head to Aulani!! But first we had a very important pit stop to make…

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There’s legitimately just mountains in the background of this Target, like:

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It was wild. We needed to stop at Target because we didn’t plan to eat every single meal at the Disney restaurants, and wanted to pick up some snacks, breakfast food, etc. Again we found an entire aisle of my beloved Hawaiian Host chocolates:

And then – finally for real this time our next stop was Aulani! I couldn’t get a good photo of the entrance sign or anything so enjoy these nice flowers that we passed on the way there:

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Okay – I know this comes as a surprise to probably no one, but Aulani was pretty much the thing we were both the most excited about getting to on our trip. We absolutely LOVED everything else we did in Hawaii but we’re still dumb Disney nerds and we were looking forward to checking in to Aulani so much! It’s a place that both of us had wanted to visit for a long time and it felt INSANE that we were finally here!!

SO we arrived at Aulani, and literally – everything was instantly perfect. My notes at this part literally say “everything is perfect and beautiful and amazing and wonderful”. It felt like stepping into another world almost??? From the SECOND we drove up to the hotel we were greeted by name (somehow?) by cast members. We were escorted in and given a really lovely lei greeting and some refreshing spa water. A reoccurring theme at Aulani was that EVERY SINGLE CAST MEMBER was great and also beautiful?? EVERYONE was kind and helpful and made us feel so welcome. It was honestly incredible how everyone was on their A game at every moment. There was literally not ONE moment in our entire stay that we had a cast member be anything less than wonderful to us!! It was fabulous!

So anyway. We were taken inside to the front desk to check in, and their front desk was SO stunning:

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The cast member checking us in was so friendly and wonderful, and excited for us to be celebrating our honeymoon! Our room was ready when we got there so we headed upstairs to check it out.

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Our room was EXQUISITE!! We were on the 15th floor with an ocean view! I took photos of everything so enjoy this brief room tour:

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Definitely took this notepad and pen home.

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Also took all these soaps.

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Did not take home this robe but did enjoy it during our stay!

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The view was beautiful!!IMG_8705

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We were delighted with our room but also just to be there!!

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We quickly dropped our bags and then headed out to explore! It was getting to be almost sunset already and we wanted to walk around while it was still light outside so we could get our bearings and figure out where everything is.

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This was the view from our building on the opposite side of our room. We were already seeing that the whole resort was just such a beautiful place!! We immediately decided we loved everything.

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We walked around the resort for a while just checking everything out and taking photos. I can’t even describe to you how absolutely GORGEOUS everything was. I feel like I keep repeating myself here but seriously – everything was just unbelievably stunning.

Of course I also took this opportunity to take some photos with their super cute buttons! I was really excited to get these since they’re different from the parks on both coasts.

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We also found our pool area of choice:

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As you can see, it was starting to get dark and we realized we were getting pretty hungry too. We stopped by their quick service location to fix that.

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They had a decent menu as well as some grab and go snacks.

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Oh, and they also had…

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Dole Whip 😍

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I’ve never been happier than this moment!!!!!

We also decided to order a pizza, so I enjoyed my Dole Whip while we waited for that. Once it was finished we took it back to the room to enjoy (I guess eating pizza in our hotel room is really a mood for this trip).

While eating we checked out the info they gave us at check in, including the Daily ‘Iwa, which gave a rundown on everything happening each day.

After we ate we were getting tired but there was still exploring to be done! First stop was the front desk, where I admired this beauty again:

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We needed to pick up some tokens for laundry. Since we were staying on DVC points, laundry tokens were free so we decided to take advantage of it! I also admired the concierge and bell services areas here – everything was just SO adorable:

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Then we were headed to the laundry room. There were a few other people in there who were really nice and complimented my ring haha. We chatted for a while and waited for our clothes to be done. By the time they were finished our exhaustion had caught up to us and we were more than ready for bed! Once we headed back upstairs and put everything away we quickly hopped in bed and drifted off to sleep after a fabulous first night at Aulani!!

I cannot wait to write about the rest of our visit to Aulani! This post only scratched the surface of how special the resort and its cast members are. We had SUCH an amazing visit and I am so excited to share all of it with you. I hope that you enjoyed this post! And as always – thank you for reading <3

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