Three years ago, our close friends went to Hawaii. Again. While their family has traveled everywhere from Europe to Asia, they’ve been to Hawaii several times and state that it’s still their favorite place in the world to go.
When they came home from their last trip, we gushed over their vacation photos and said “If you ever go back… we want to go too!” For our family, vacations had been kind of falling into a theme-park rut. We’d done Walt Disney World, Universal, Wisconsin Dells, and the circuit of local water parks in years past… to the point that the last time we took a theme park trip, I felt like I needed a vacation just to rest after days of attacking the parks like commandos on a mission.
So, we thought: What if we took a break for a few years, saved up, and took a different kind of vacation? One that involved experiencing the beauty of the world instead of waiting in lines? And what if we took that vacation with our friends? With our kids, their kids… ALL the kids?!
Along the way, another family (mutual friends of both of ours) said “We want to go too!” And so it began.
This month, the Hawaii-what-if became a reality:
Eight days. Three families. One house. And here’s how we did it.
Airfare
Flying to Hawaii is expensive – there’s no way to sugarcoat that fact. If you’ve been saving up your airline miles, isn’t something like this what you’ve been saving them for? One of the families had their roundtrip airfares entirely comped on miles. The other family (the Hawaii pros) put themselves in charge of watching airfares online… every day. Many of their previous trips were based on first finding that “good” airfare, as once that’s locked in, it opens the door for everything else to fall into place. At about the two-month-out mark, airfares dropped by $200 per ticket, and I got the “If we’re going to do this… today’s the day to book!” phonecall.
Having never been to Hawaii, I assumed people island-hop from one island to another. And many do. But at their cheapest rate, Hawaiian Airlines’ fares between the islands are $75 per person, one way. Even hopping from one island to another and back would cost our family $750 for just that single “hop.” That was out of the budget for us for this trip, and our Hawaii-veteran friends assured us that there was so much to see on any one island that it wasn’t worth wasting time or money spending half of a vacation day on a plane to somewhere else — they’d done that before and didn’t enjoy it. So, we decided to pick one island and stay there for the duration.
We had initially planned to go for one week, but our airfare was cheaper if we stayed Sunday to Sunday. So that’s what we did. We flew out of O’Hare with a stop in Phoenix, and then it was a long seven-hour stretch until we landed in Lihue.
Tip: Airfares to Hawaii are cheapest from September until the second week of December. This unfortunately was not an option for this trip due to all of the kids’ school schedules. But if your kids are young, or you’re traveling without children… that’s a great time to aim for.
Tip: Airlines are not required to serve meals on domestic flights, even for a seven-hour span from the mainland to Hawaii,. We flew US Airways, and they offered “snack box” meals of crackers, turkey jerky, cheese and roasted nuts for $6 each. We all brought snack foods in our carry-on bags, encouraging our kids to pack their own backpacks with enough things they liked to eat to get them through the flight. It would have cost our family $30 to have snack-box lunches. You can pack a lot of granola bars, fruit snacks, and crackers yourself for $30!
Which Island?
Again, we trusted our Hawaii-vet friends on this one, and they didn’t steer us wrong. As they’d visited five of the seven main Hawaiian islands before, they suggested Kauai, “The Garden Island” of Hawaii, which was also their favorite. It is the oldest island in the Hawaiian island chain, and they praised it for the lack of big-city traffic and hustle-and-bustle (Oahu, they’re talking about you!) and the prevalence of gorgeous scenery, quiet beaches, and quintessential tropical-island experiences. Even though they’d traveled to Kauai before, they said they hadn’t done or seen half of what there was to do there.
Tip: The “Big Island” of Hawaii is the only island with an active volcano. If this is important to you to see, that’s where you’ll want to go.
House versus Hotel
We’d never rented a house to vacation in before — I’ve got locating hotel discounts down to a science! But our Hawaii-veteran friends had rented a vacation home on a previous trip. They raved about the cost savings of being able to cook most, if not all, of their meals versus going out to restaurants three times a day. Our friends found a five-bedroom house on a site advertising Hawaii home rentals that would accommodate all thirteen of us. One room of the house was set up as a “family bedroom” with two double beds and two twin beds – perfect for our family of five, as our boys were the youngest of all of the children.
The house also had a washer and dryer, which meant that we could plan to do laundry during the week. Which meant we could all pack less clothing and travel with carry-on bags instead of checking bags, avoiding bag-check fees. A definite win!
Tip: If eating out every night is mandatory for your vacation, planning to cook most of your meals may not be the best option for you. (Even my mom said, “When I go on vacation, I don’t want to cook!”) But with the cost of food in Hawaii, it was the right choice for us.
Tip: If you do look at renting a house in Hawaii, houses on the beach are significantly more expensive than houses located inland. Houses on the beach usually do not have a swimming pool either due to being so close to the shoreline. We chose a house that was less than five miles from the closest beach, and it did have a pool.
Getting Around
You’ll need a car on Kauai. Play the who’s-got-the-best-rate game with the rental car companies on the island and pick the lowest price. Our friends advised getting an SUV versus a car for two reasons: One, to haul surfboards and kayaks on the roof, and two, to handle some of the rougher roads on the island. (How rough? Check out this video of the drive to Polihale Beach!)
For this trip, Hertz was the winner. I tried several coupon codes I found online, but in the end, my Hertz Gold loyalty number got me the best discount out of all of them — $18 off per day. Two of us rented identical SUVs with Hertz with this rate. It is worth signing up for those loyalty perks – even if you don’t utilize them often, the benefits may surprise you.
The third family broke form and rented a Jeep, and I’m pretty sure this was because the husband had visions of driving a Jeep around in Hawaii with surfboards in the back and the top down. (Which on some days, they did!)
We learned very quickly that you don’t go anywhere fast in Kauai. The roads are narrow and curvy, there are many one-lane bridges on some parts of the island, and a 10-mile drive will take about 30 minutes. But when the scenery looks like this… who’s in a hurry?
Tip: As much of a pain as it is to lug your kids’ car booster seats on vacation, it’s cheaper. Hertz wanted $68 per child to rent booster seats for a week… booster seats that cost $13 at Walmart. We briefly toyed with trying to buy booster seats once we arrived in Hawaii, but instead we put both seats in a duffel bag and consolidated the boys’ clothes into one carry-on suitcase so that we could still have the proper number of carry-on items on the plane.
Our rental house
This was the first trip our family has ever taken in which we stayed in a rental house. We loved it, but it’s definitely a night-and-day experience versus staying in a hotel. Here’s what was different in our Kauai “home:”
Possible negatives if you like to be “spoiled” on vacation:
No maid service: If you wanted your sheets or towels changed, you did that yourself. And if you wanted those sheets and towels laundered, you did that yourself too. Our house had a large closet filled with additional clean sheets, bath towels and beach towels, but we washed the towels several times during our stay. There had to be about 30 beach towels in there, but with 13 of us going to the beach and pool each day, we were out of clean beach towels by day three.
No TV: I’m sure other vacation homes probably did have TV service, but our house had neither cable, satellite, or antenna. We were blissfully cut off from viewing what was going on in the world. This seemed strange at first, but then again, who goes to Hawaii to watch TV? The house did have a DVD collection that we were welcome to use, with a good mix of children’s, action, and thriller films. Each bedroom did have a television and DVD player. The family room had a large projector set in the ceiling for group movie nights too. (And, we weren’t entirely cut off from civilization. The house did have a free wifi connection that we could use. Hey, I had to write my blog!)
No heat or air conditioning: While this seems surprising at first, apparently many of the homes on the island are the same way — no air and no heat. The temperatures on Kauai are usually in the 75-85 degree range most days, and the breeze is constant. We never closed a window and we were never uncomfortable inside the house.
Geckos: Geckos are everywhere in Hawaii. The homeowner told us that we would likely see them in the house as it was hard to keep them out, adding that locals don’t mind them, because “they eat spiders.” I have to say, we never minded them either, and they’re very cute. Occasionally we saw a gecko running on the ceiling, and one of the kids even caught a very tiny one in the kitchen.
Positives versus staying in a hotel:
Access to “toys”: The house had a bunch of water gear that would have cost us a lot of money had we needed to rent or buy it ourselves — four kayaks, numerous surfboards, paddleboards, and boogie boards, as well as inflatable beach toys, swim rings, children’s life vests, and even a cooler to take to the beach. The homeowner taught us how to tie the bigger gear onto our vehicles (two pool noodles on the roof, with the boards or kayaks tied on top — “how all the locals do it,” he said.) Later in the trip, we saw rental stands offering boards or kayaks for $25-$50 each per day. Rentals per person with a group this size… for a week? That would have added up fast. The house also had a rec room, which was the hot spot for many nightly pool and dart games.
Access to kitchen: The kitchen had everything you’d need to cook for a big group – plenty of pots and pans, dishes, and a variety of small appliances too including a food processor and juicer. There was an electric range and oven, a microwave, and a gas grill on the lanai (covered patio) outside which we used almost every day too. And yes, when you do your own cooking, you do your own dishes too. The kitchen did have a dishwasher. Of the 23 meals we had in Hawaii, we only ate out four times — two lunches and two dinners. Cooking at home was an enormous money-saver for all of the families.
Access to fruit trees: The house had a fruit orchard, with mangos, grapefruit, lemons and limes, avocados, and even some local fruits I’ve never seen before. We were encouraged to enjoy the fruit trees during our stay. This meant free fresh fruit, fruit salad with breakfast each day, and homemade lemonade. And look at the size of that mango..!
Access to… chickens? I was a bit thrown by this when I stepped out of the airport and almost stepped on a live chicken, but wild chickens are just part of Kauai life. They’re running around everywhere, and they’re as common as crows or robins are here in Illinois. Our house had a chicken coop in the yard, where the homeowner kept a flock of chickens too. He encouraged us to gather the eggs and eat them during our stay, which meant there wasn’t a single day in which we did not cook those free eggs! We were also responsible for feeding the chickens each day — the homeowner left pails of chicken feed by the coop. My kids got quite an education on this trip as to where eggs really come from when we went out to the henhouse each morning. They’d feed the chickens, and I’d go in and bring out the new eggs. They also learned that not all eggs are white..! We had a lot of brown eggs, and on some days we were surprised with brilliant blue eggs too.
Bottom line: If you rent a house, while you’re on vacation, you’re still staying in someone else’s home. There were photos of the homeowner’s children on the walls, as well as signs to remind you to take your shoes off at the door and turn off the lights when you go out. But by the end of the first day, you start to feel like it’s your home too, and you take care of it the way you would your own. By the third day, you wonder if you’ll ever want to leave.
Things to see and do
There are many great things about Kauai, but what I loved the most was that it was it was so non-“touristy.” All of the public beaches are free, and there are so many gorgeous places to hike, kayak, swim and explore. Here are some of the things we did, and again — nearly all of them were FREE!
Queens Bath:
Queens Bath is a natural tide pool on Kauai’s north shore. In the morning, these black lava rock pools fill with water when the tide comes in. They’re beautiful, and they’re also dangerous. During many months, the waves hit the coast hard and high, and the level of water in the pools fill and drain unpredictably (seriously, check out this video — it’s this crazy at the wrong time of year.) Numerous people have died at Queens Bath after not heeding the warnings. But in the summer, it’s considered safe to visit if you’re careful about the times of day. To be safe, only swim when the water is calm — especially if you’re bringing kids.
Hiking to the tide pools is steep, but not terribly difficult. It’s through a lot of Kauai red clay mud, which will stain everything it touches, so don’t wear good clothes or shoes. (I’m speaking from experience. We hiked in rubber water shoes, but both my husband and son have swim trunks that are now permanently stained rust orange.) Once you get to the coast, you’ll be climbing down some large lava rocks to get to the pools.
Is it worth it? Oh, yes. Once we got to the pools, we swam all afternoon. We knew it was time to get out though when a big wave came over one of the smaller pools in front of the large pool that the kids were in. The wave knocked two of our (adult) friends down. Everyone climbed out immediately. The end.
Hiking and fishing
We hiked and fished on Kauai’s north side near our house too. The homeowner had told us there were fishing ponds about a half-mile from our house, and two miles further, there was a stone waterfall in an area that used to be a sugar plantation in the 1800s. He said the hike was worth seeing, and it was:
Coming over the top of a hill and seeing this? Breathtaking!
On another hike, our 7-year-old confessed that his “Hawaii dream” was to “stand in a waterfall.” We found a nice one along a path and did just that.
Waimea Canyon
Waimea Canyon is known as the “Grand Canyon of the Pacific.” There are many spots on the island offering helicopter tours of the canyon. These are about $200 per person. We opted to drive to the canyon lookout, which is in a state park… and free! The drive takes about 25 minutes to get to the top. It too, is worth it:
Beaches
If the local travel guide I read was correct, there are 43 beaches on Kauai. We didn’t come close to visiting them all, but every beach we saw was beautiful.
Haena Beach is on the north shore, and it’s also the home of Maniniholo Cave, which you can walk right off the beach and go exploring in, to the kids’ delight.
None of the beaches we visited were terribly crowded, though at Poipu Beach, we did have some non-human visitors:
The kids were thrilled to see two Monk seals sunning on the beach! They are a protected species in Hawaii, and signs on the beach note that they should be left alone if they come out of the water to rest. About an hour later, both of them scooted down the beach and back into the waves.
Lydgate Beach was the site of our daughter’s first boogie-board wipeout:
There was also a small beach near the house we were staying at. I don’t know if it even has a name. Our homeowner referred to it as “the beach down by Ben Stiller’s house,” advising that the river there was a great place to put the kayaks in the water. (Note: We spotted neither Ben Stiller nor any other celebrities on this trip. In fact, there were days in which we barely saw any other people at all.)
Kauai Coffee
My husband loves Kauai Coffee, which is grown (guess where!) on Kauai. (We haven’t had a coupon deal on it since March of this year either, but I digress…) You can visit the Kauai Coffee plantation for a free, self-guided walking tour and free tastings of their 20+ varieties of coffee. Did you know that coffee beans are red when they’re ripe and ready to pick — not brown?
Luau
The most touristy thing we did on the trip was attend a luau. (For more than half of us, this was our first trip to Hawaii, so this was something we wanted to experience.) This was also one of only two dinners we ate out. After looking at the luau options on the island, which ranged from a hotel luau at a Hyatt to a Cirque-themed modern luau, we chose Smith’s Garden Luau. This one was supposed to be the most traditional-styled luau on the island, and we liked that part of the ceremony involved the imu, the volcanic rock roasting pit in the ground where the pig is traditionally cooked. Our boys were absolutely fascinated watching the men dig out the dirt, uncover the steaming banana leaves, and lift the steamed pig out of the volcanic rocks.
From there, the luau featured pretty much everything you’d think it would. The food was buffet-style, all you can eat and drink, and everything was fantastic. (Well, except the poi, which is a very bland dish made from taro root. It’s a local tradition.) During dinner, a ukulele group played Hawaiian music, kids were invited up to learn the hula, and after dinner, guests were treated to a show featuring traditional Polynesian music and fire dancers.
This was expensive – $68 per person, with the kids priced at $30 (ages 7-13) and $19 (ages 3-6.) Booking tickets online saved $10 off each admission though, and for our group, that was a whopping $130. If you wanted to save even more, you could attend the luau without eating — the show itself is only $15. We wanted the whole experience though and budgeted for this.
The luau did leave a big impression on our kids, who could not believe how the pigs were cooked. Each night, one of my sons wrote postcards to family and friends. This was his hilarious post-luau postcard to his great-aunt:
Staying with friends:
While some people might want to get away from everyone and everything on vacation, we’d always wanted to take a big trip with our friends. Having three families in one house for a week could potentially raise some issues with everyone getting along all of the time, but I’m happy to report that everyone really did get along all the time. By the second day, all of the adults settled into a routine of who-does-what, with everyone assuming various duties – meal-planning, cooking, laundry, cleaning up, and what not.
Some of our best times together were the down times too. Coming back to the house after a long day of adventuring often led to game time. The house had some board games in the closet, leading to a long bout of Monopoly, as well as many hands of Uno. The older kids often played pool at night and chess in the mornings, and by the end of our trip (and much patient instruction from our friends’ sons) my younger boys also learned to play chess. We did everything together, with the exception of the one day that I stayed behind at the house to finish working on my blog’s grocery deals for you guys. I pulled a lot of late nights to keep up with the blog, but by the end of the week, I really needed a full day of blogging to get all of the deals written. But, no complaints – work’s a pleasure when the “office” was as picturesque as this one.
I am so grateful to our dear friends for helping make this trip a reality. My husband and I had long believed Hawaii was a place we’d consider going when the kids were grown and we were older. All of us sharing expenses of the house and of our meals (as well as everyone’s willingness to cook and eat at home!) helped make this trip possible. And while I realize packing 13 people into a house might not be some people’s idea of a vacation… we wouldn’t have had it any other way.
Shopping for food (and everything else…)
palatino says
I enjoyed this. Hawaii is a lot more extreme than we thought it was. Don’t know if we’d be up for all the walking but it sure is pretty. I thought people go hop to the islands too but never thought about renting another car when you get to the next island etc. that can add up fast. We want to go someday so this is a lot to think about. Great photos. It really is pretty there.
Green Is Good says
Thanks for this post! It looks like you had an awesome time! Maybe one of these days my family will take a trip to Hawaii!
Tamurray says
Looks like a great trip! I visited there in July and loved it. I had previously been to Maui (gorgeous) and Oahu (NYC with beach, except the Arizona is a moving place to visit).
We hit most everywhere you did but did not venture into the bath! There are tons of free things to do on Kauai and many are easy to get to. The canyon is stunning!
Gas was expensive and you do put on a lot of miles!
Thanks for sharing!
amjacobs909 says
Hi Jill,
Would you be willing to divulge how much the airfare was per person? We’ve been wanting to go back to Hawaii, but the expensive airfare has kept us wishing, instead of planning.
Thanks!
bigmoney says
I remember seeing shops selling “red dirt shirts” and other “red dirt” items all over Kauai. Then we took a hike along the Napali coast, and we had red dirt EVERYTHING. Saved money on souvenirs!
VJB says
Hawaii is definatley my dream vacation. I would also rent a home instead of staying at a hotel- learned how much cheaper house rental is when we went to Disney and rented a home for 8 days for 13 people for $950. Thanks for all the info on this island. When I picture myself in Hawaii I don’t picture all the tourists just the beautiful scenery so this would be a perfect island for us. Hopefully we will make it one day and since my youngest is not even 2 yet we have time to save for this dream vacation.
Oh and my “Hawaii dream” is also to stand under a waterfall! Lol.
Outlander says
What was the range of prices for house rentals? How did you guys find which house to rent or who to go through?
Thanks for writing, it’s very interesting! Just watched that video about Queen’s Bath, looks very scary, almost want to yell at those 3 boys to get out of the water! LOL
addicted says
Looks like an amazing vacation!
I really enjoyed reading this as well as the grocery shopping in Hawaii post. You’ve given very useful and helpful info for planning a trip like this, or really a trip anywhere. My husband and I have been to Hawaii and it’s my dream to go back. And the kids are wishing to go as well! (Not sure why, they just must hear me mumbling about it all the time)
Please continue with “the very-occasional Travels of the Week” series in the future!
rachelacullen says
Seems very amazing , especially the queens bath. Thanks for sharing.