We made it back to Kauai in March and had a great time as always. This was the first trip with my second son, who was 19 months at the time. I’m always worried with how the young ones will do with the travel, but he did great!
On our last trip to Kauai, we had a connecting flight in Oahu. It’s not a big deal for adults, but it was pretty rough with my older son (2 at the time). So this time around, I said I’d pay whatever more it cost to take a direct flight (which is a lot easier to say when you’re using miles).
We tried to make this trip easy as possible and stayed over the night before at LAX, which was a great decision. Getting to LA is probably the most stressful part of the trip, especially if it’s on a weekday.
We had a direct flight to and from Lihue, which was great, except for the aircraft. It turns out, United only seems to use the small 737s on the direct flights to Kauai. That’s the small, crammed plane that you usually take on Southwest. It’s fine for an hour, but 6 hours was way too much and there was no room to take crying babies to the back. I’ll have to re-think the direct flights next time…
The theme of this trip is that everything was different with a family. Last time, we only had one child and my mom and brother came along. This time, we had two kids and it made a world of difference. Instead of doing more adventurous things, we spent every day like this. Go to a beach in the morning, find some place to eat lunch, go back to the hotel to take a nap, swim in the pool in the afternoon, find dinner at sleep by 8. But honestly, it was great and I had no complaints.
Another difference is that we stayed part of the time at the Waipouli Beach Resort with this great pool.
It was so fun for the kids that they didn’t want to go anywhere else.
But we did and stayed in Princeville the second half of the trip. This place was nice but we had to walk so far up and down hills to get from the car to the condo. It was pretty challenging with two little ones and everything is a little less inconvenient on the north side.
When it was just the two of us, we would’ve liked the Princeville place better. But with the kids, we’d definitely choose the other place. It was fun and there was food and markets right across the street. Lesson learned for the next trip!