Aloha and mahalo

Goodbye Hawaii, we’ll miss you.

We’ll miss our warm, welcoming home for the last week. Grand Hyatt Kauai you were good to us and we couldn’t have picked a better hotel for kids with those acres of water attractions. See TubaDad’s bright blue shirt up there in this pic, by the way? That was our room after we decided the first room was wayyyyyyy too far from the action and requested a room near the pools. (Great decision, no regrets.) He was still up there getting our huge mound of luggage on the cart while we walked down to the pool to give away our inner tubes to newbies on the island and leave our offering of wilted leis as goodbyes on the rocks.

We’ll miss the many funky little restaurants (like this one in the hotel called Tidepool’s, and our old favorite Roy’s, and the new one we found called Merriman’s) and the funny servers who always had time to chat about the weird and wonderful stuff on the menus (like pea shoots, micro arugula, monchong, and black rice):

We’ll miss the hotel’s salt-water lagoon and man-made beach, miles of winding pools, and wild water slide:

We’ll miss all the fantastically lush greenery and funny trees that seemed to hug the ground instead of growing under it:

We’ll miss the gorgeous flowers as big as our heads that were everywhere on the island:

We’ll miss the demanding Cheerio-munching swans, koi, and chickens around every corner:

And we’ll miss that delightful fresh-fresh food. I was in complete bliss to have fish every single day. And the girls loved all the ahi sashimi, fruit, steamed rice, and noodles. Here’s what they had at the airport before hopping on that loooooong first flight. This is pure comfort food to Ree (left) and Ro:

The girls were troopers on the flights (due to the thrill of non-stop eating and unlimited movies and games) but were starting to droop after we landed in SFO well after midnight. Nothing that nice warm jammies and comfy carseats couldn’t fix. I think they were asleep before we even pulled out of the parking garage. :-)

Goodbye Hawaii, we’ll be back! Mahalo.

PS: It must have gotten cold here while we were gone. Actually had to turn the heater on when we got home to warm up our freezing house. I think that’s the first time this winter that we’ve had the heater on.