We spent the better part of the day traveling today. We left home at 8:00 a.m. and arrived in Kona, Hawaii around 2:00 p.m. local time. The flight felt like your typical butt buster overseas flight and the day seemed to drag on. A funny anecdote is that we had an early breakfast today, flew for three hours and landed in a breakfast time time-zone only to eat pizza for breakfast then proceeded to Hawaii and landed during lunch time.
The rest of our day was a bit challenging and unexpected. Little did we know that Kona airport didn’t have umbilical walkways to the airplane. We actually had to climb down stairs from our jet! We then had to walk about half a mile to get our luggage and no there weren’t any moving walkways either!
We then proceeded to our car rental where a queue of 9 people were being serviced by a staff of two. It only took 38 minutes to get our car! The clerks were eventually attentive and helpful but the long wait was very disappointing. I’m keeping score on all our “vendors” and I’ll summarize at the end of our trip.
We finally drove to our hotel which wasn’t too far from the airport. I was somewhat disappointed with the size of our room. At nearly $300/night for an ocean front view room, you’d expect a little more space. As I checked in there was a couple checking in next to us that complained about the hotels daily resort fee of $20/day. I could over hear part of the argument centering around whether parking was included or not in the fee. Evidently parking was included with our $20/day fee for some reason but they would need to pay an extra $10/day for parking which would bring their total up to $30/day which is quite frankly ridiculous.
The ludicrous fees might explain why during spring break, this hotel of hundreds of rooms had but a scant few people staying here. The beach and pools were totally empty all day today! I’ll post a follow up review of our hotel at the end of our trip.
After arriving at the hotel, we headed out to a nearby shop to get some grub. Be forewarned that there are no fast food restaurants for miles around Kona so if you’re traveling with kids be sure you eat either at the airport or plan on stopping at Costco to pick up something unless you don’t mind paying $20 for lunch per person. We ended up eating at a fish and chips place at Kings Place where lunch for two adults and two kids cost $40 (the kids shared one plate of food).
We picked up a few snacks and headed back to the hotel to check out the beach (sunset) and pools. We ended the day on a high note as the sunset was spectacular and the heated spa pools provided some much needed relaxation after a very long hectic day. The sand here feels strange, it feels more like salt & pepper than typical beach sand. We’ve been to Cancun’s white sandy beaches , Gulf of Mexico brown sugar sands and many other places but this sand feels totally unique. Your feet actually sink into the sand without any water agitation as in other beaches.
And here is a shot of the sunset our first day here!
Categories: Hawaii
Comments Off on Hawaii – Day 1
