Hawaii Trip – Day One – The Adventure Begins

Since we spent the majority of our first day on a plane and there was not a lot of activity to report, I will take a moment to answer the number one question I received about our trip to Hawaii, which was, “Why the Big Island?” When I first started planning my trip, my original intent was to island hop. My husband said to keep the trip under two weeks and I had to remain within my budget. I planned for 13 days, meeting requirement number one, and started researching the major costs involved in the trip: airfare, hotels, car rental, and must do activities. The Big Island would be our first stop for three major reasons. First, it has an active volcano. My son spent from the ages of 4-6 wanting to be a volcanologist, until he suddenly realized the personal danger he would be in and moved on to wanting to be a firefighter for a few weeks, until he again realized the personal danger, spent a few weeks wishing tornado chasing was a safer occupation, then temporarily settled on wanting to develop fireworks.  I really wanted all of us to have the experience of walking around on an active volcano and we were all hoping to see a lava flow. Second, my husband and kids both wanted to snorkel and Kealakekua Bay is purportedly one of the top 5 snorkeling spots of all the islands. Molokini Crater was my initial pick for snorkeling, but is located by Maui, so I decided to save that for a return trip. Third, the island has 10 distinct climate zones, ranging from rain forest to desert to periglacial.  My daughter has been a nature girl since birth, it seems. She was majoring in environmental studies at the time and was intensely interested in experiencing as many of the climate zones as possible, we managed 9/10 of them. We did not go all the way to the summit of Mauna Kea, which is the periglacial zone, we remained at the visitor center which is 9,200 feet versus 14,000 at the summit. Once I had finished researching the Big Island I realized that not only did I all ready have enough activities to fill 13 days, but also, that by staying on one island I would free up quite a bit of money that would otherwise be spent on 4 additional plane tickets to get us from one island to the next. It is always my thought process that I probably will not return to a location we’ve all ready been to because there are so many places that we want to go, so once I am there, I need to be as thorough as possible….with out driving my family nuts and to the point of exhaustion. The choice was made to travel around the entire island, see everything on my list and go back and visit the other islands on different trips. (This trip did take place in 2014, keep that in mind when looking at costs from the itinerary page, they will not be up to date, they will be what we paid at the time.) We have never regretted that decision, we had an amazing trip, and I am currently planning a trip to Maui for next spring. (Maui trip has been taken, the link will take you to that itinerary.)

The view of Hilo Bay from our balcony at the Castle Hilo

As I said at the beginning, we spent the majority of our first day on a plane. We choose a two hour layover in California so we would have time to eat a decent dinner (decent as far as airport food goes) and walk around between our two long flights. We landed in Hilo, Hawaii a little before 8 pm, rented a car and drove to Castle Hilo, our first hotel.  We choose Castle Hilo for its proximity to the airport, because of it’s central location on the windward side of the island and because it was located directly on Hilo Bay. 

Many people were surprised that we spent as much time as we did on the windward (rainy) side of the island, versus the leeward (warm sandy beach) side. Again, several reasons for this decision. First of all, every guide book I read said that if it is raining where you are go 10 minutes north or south and it will most likely by dry. It does rain in Hilo on average 361 days a year. We just happened to be in Hilo on the 3 days of the year that it decided not to rain. Second, we were taking a helicopter ride that left from the Hilo airport and we wanted to be close to the airport. Third, we wanted to visit many of the lava rock beaches, the Hawaii Tropical Botanic Gardens, Liliuokalani Gardens, Wailuku River State Park, Akaka Falls State Park, and take the Hamakua Coast Drive, all of which are on the windward side of the island. So we started and ended our trip in Hilo.

Castle Hilo is a moderately priced hotel, the room was clean and functional, not a super fancy resort, but it suited our needs perfectly. We had a spacious balcony with a table and chairs overlooking Hilo Bay, where we spent time trying to locate the elusive turtle that we kept hearing. I had never heard a turtle before, I thought it sounded like a dinosaur groaning.  Of course, how I would know what a dinosaur sounds like is beyond me, but I felt pretty sure that is what it would sound like. They seemed to like swimming in the bay at high tide. I became quite obsessed with finding turtles on our trip, although I never was the first to spot one.

One of the things I loved about staying here is that it is located directly next to Liliuokani Gardens, which is a beautiful 14 acre Japanese style garden, open 24 hours to the public. We spent two evenings leisurely strolling through the gardens at the end of the day.

We were completely satisfied with our experience at Castle Hilo, when we checked in for our last night, we choose a room with a view of Banyan Drive versus the bay. Once we got into our room, we were contemplating switching rooms to have a view of the bay for our last night. My husband went to use the bathroom and discovered that the toilet was not secured very well to the floor and wiggled whenever anyone sat on it. We went down to talk to management, to let them know about the bathroom, and to ask for a room with a view of the bay, which we were willing to pay the upgraded price for. Due to the bathroom issue, they gave us a room with the view we wanted at no additional cost, even though we offered to pay the difference. They also called our room about 15 minutes later to make sure our new room was with out issue. If we were ever to return to Hilo, I would be happy to return to this hotel and have recommended it to friends. Again, it’s not super fancy, but it is in a great location if you are planning on staying on the windward side of the island for any amount of time.

Our first day of travel was smooth sailing, the only minor glitch being when my husband discovered that I had packed an entire suitcase full of shoes, but that is a story for another day. If you are interested in following along on the rest of our Hawaii adventure, please subscribe to receive an email notification when the next post is available or sign up for the RSS feed. Wishing you happy travels and fantastic adventures in this thing called life.

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View from Castle Hilo in Hawaii