Our Honeymoon – Day 10/11 – Aloha ‘Oe, Hawaii

I’m double posting today because I accidentally hit publish because this is post #10 – the LAST post – 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 10 – MONDAY, FEBRUARY 12

So here we are – finally on the last day of our honeymoon. I’m honestly getting extremely sad writing this lol it’s like I’m reliving leaving the island all over again! But rather than focus on that, let’s jump in to our last day in Hawaii.

We woke up (as predicted) super sad and dreading our departure. We got ready for the day and finished packing everything up – it all fit, thankfully!

We said goodbye to our room and took our bags down to the car, then lounged around a bit more. This included looking for Menehune, looking at our favorite parts of the resort, and getting some last minute photopass pics!

We found an amazing photopass photographer by the pool who was roaming, and just walked around with us taking as many photos as we wanted!

She had so many good ideas for creative locations and poses!!

These ended up being some of my favorite photos from the trip! I’m so glad that we stopped and got a few more before we left.

Once we were done and satisfied with our photoshoot, we hopped back over to the store to purchase our photopass CD. And while we’re checking out, the MOST magical thing happened to us. So we’re here looking at our photos, and talking to the girl about how it’s our last day and we’re so sad to leave and all that. And suddenly she looks at us and says WAIT… are you guys the couple from Walt Disney World?

And so I’m like, yes… and she says, omg, we’ve all been talking about you guys all week! Everyone here has heard your magical story and we think your photos are so cute, we all love you!

Me in that moment:

I seriously almost lost it right there in the store. I already couldn’t believe how nice everybody was, and how perfect and amazing and wonderful our time at Aulani had been, and I was already sad to leave – and this just really pushed everything over the edge. They were all so kind and excited to help us that it just made my heart swell so much.

And then she turns around and gives us this:

And that time, I did cry! They gave us a print of “their favorite photo” as a final gift to us for our honeymoon. I couldn’t believe the generosity of these cast members and their genuine happiness for us – I’m crying now again thinking about it. I still can’t believe how nice those cast members were to us and that we could make an impact on them like that during our short visit. It was seriously the cherry on top of a perfect trip and I could not stop thanking them for their kindness.

So anyway. We said goodbye to the cast members there and then went for a snack, including my last Aulani shave ice!

Chris had the delicious pork quesadillas again:

We walked around the whole place one last time, getting some last minute photos and basically just metaphorically holding on for dear life before we had to leave!

Stumbled upon a Moana meet & greet – so cute!

We had a few more things we wanted to do elsewhere on the island before our flight that evening and didn’t know if we’d have time to stop by again, so we waved goodbye to Aulani and drove up to the North Shore of Oahu. We also stopped at the Dole Plantation on the way up.

The Dole Plantation was basically exactly what you’d expect – everything pineapple, everywhere. We didn’t pay for the tour or anything but we walked around and took some photos, and checked out the MASSIVE pineapple gift shop.

Every pineapple-themed item you could ever want!

I had to wait for some kids to get out of the big pineapple before I could hop up and get my photo, but I got it!

We didn’t spend too much time there, just a quick look around before heading further up to the north shore. The area was really pretty but crowded, which was fine – we really just wanted to check out the beach and the surfers!

We stopped at the first little park we saw. The beach was so pretty, with some of the biggest waves I’ve ever seen!! And people were out there surfing!!!

We sat and watched the waves and the surfers for a little while.

We spent a little time there before getting back on the road for our last lunch in Hawaii. We stopped at a place that was actually recommended to us earlier by our photographer – as soon as she said it I knew we had to go, because it was called Teddy’s! We made a stop in honor of my little Teddy.

I guess it’s a popular burger chain on Oahu and it was pretty good! We both had a burger and fries and I also had a shake. Once we finished eating it was still really early… we had about 3 hours to kill still, so we actually decided to head back to Aulani!

First we stopped at Target one more time, to get some chocolate macadamia nuts for the road.

I also got this great reusable bag:

Once we were back at Aulani we got one more snack, a vanilla Dole Whip:

And just enjoyed a little more time there. The weather was nice, there was a dude playing live music – it was just so pleasant.

And then it was time to leave – again! I’m actually glad we went back because we were a lot less sad this time. I got one last souvenir from the guy working the DVC kiosk on the way out:

And we were off! All we had to do was drop off the rental car and then we were back at the airport. Honolulu turned out to be a confusing airport – the station for our airline was just empty with no people working there at all?? Luckily we had our boarding passes on our phone so it wasn’t that big of an issue. And I kept getting notifications that our flight was maybe delayed? Also, my gate tracker app was disagreeing with the departure board on where we needed to go so we got a little turned around – obviously leaving was a bad idea!!

Luckily we finally found where we were supposed to be, found a spot to plug in and charge (which turned out to be difficult) and got some food.

Loving the themed bathroom signs at the Honolulu airport though:

Finally – we were on our flight and taking off (close to) on time.

I started watching a movie but passed out after about 10 minutes in the air, and luckily was able to sleep mostly the whole time. We had a layover in Seattle, and were freaking out because our next flight took off at 7:50 and we hit the ground at 44 – but we realized that the time change was off, and we were landing at 6:44, not 7:44 lol! So we had plenty of time. Well, maybe not plenty – but enough!

Flight #2 started boarding right away, so we didn’t have time to get food or anything.

On this one I watched a few movies and got a snack, and had fun watching the flight tracker – I always love to do this on flights.

For some reason this flight was full of really loud people – everyone was excited to go to Disney World I guess!

And 5 hours later we were almost home. By the time we landed we had been on a plane or in an airport for like 20 hours, and we were so ready to be on the ground!

Our lovely Alec came to pick us up at the airport and we rewarded him with gifts and stories. It was so weird to be home, in such a normal place, after this whirlwind experience and some of the most exciting and happy times of our lives. We were sad it was over, but happy to be home.

– – –

I think it goes without saying that we had an absolutely incredible time on our honeymoon! We saw so many cool things and I will never forget the awesome memories we made on this trip. It was a perfect trip to celebrate our marriage and start our new life together! I have had so much fun just reliving it through writing these posts and remembering all the fun we had. I am so grateful to all the people that helped us make this trip happen and gifted us things from our honeymoon registry or even just sent well wishes. It was one of the best trips of my life and I am eagerly looking forward to the next time we get to return to Hawaii and Aulani <3

I hope so much that you enjoyed reading about our honeymoon! I can’t believe I’m actually finished writing about all of this and I’m done! That just means it’s time for our next adventure, I guess 🙂 Thank you so much for reading all of this if you have! To finish off, I’m going to leave you with two things.

First, a video of a few fun moments from our honeymoon that I didn’t include elsewhere. It includes the luau footage from that post, as well as all the other tiny instagram videos I took while we were in Hawaii. I didn’t think to compile them at the time I was writing all my other posts but since I’m making videos now I have a place to throw them all together like a little highlight reel! Sorry they’re all vertical, I was clearly more focused on instagram-story-quality than vlogging at the time haha:

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uym6EioWmOM&w=560&h=315]

And the other thing is some stock photos of Aulani from our photopass CD, in case you weren’t already convinced about wanting to go there. Enjoy!

Aloha and mahalo for reading this crazy saga!

xo,