Aulani Trip--Day 1 (Thursday)

We just got back last night from one of our best family vacations yet--Hawaii. Disney's Aulani, to be more precise. OMG, it was so incredible, and I wish we were back there. I'm going to do a trip report post on each day with pictures, and then I'll post an overall resort resort review.

Thursday (11/10):
Eric and I got up at 3:45am and got ready. We woke the kids at 4:30am, and his dad picked us up at 5am. 

Drove to DCA, and got on our flight without any problems. The first flight went well, except Deke was a little crazy. Eric sat with him, and I sat with P&F in the row in front of him. Our plane actually arrived in Phoenix nearly 1.5 hours early (highly unusual on a westbound flight but winds were going in the opposite direction), but they didn't have a gate open for us, so we ended up sitting on the runway for 1.5 hours. That was probably the worst part. 

You can all feel free to put this on your Pinterest board--arts and crafts with barf bags. :)

Got off the plane in PHX, and only had about an hour, and in that time we had to got to the bathroom, find some lunch, fill water bottles, give kids chance to stretch their legs, find someplace to charge the kids' kindles, and stand in a huge line to get new boarding passes b/c we had seats in five different rows. It was crazy at the airport, but we got it all done except for charging the kindles, which meant we had very battery left on the kindles for the kids on the longer flight.

Thankfully, they were able to put us all together on the second flight. I sat with Deke, and Eric sat with P&F. The kids were SO, SO, SO good. Deke was especially good. I was shocked. He didn't even want to watch his kindle, and happily sat and played with various toys for hours on end. It was amazing. The first flight was about 5 hours. The second flight was 6.5 hours. They were long but we did just fine.

Got to the airport here, and all was well until we couldn't find Eric's luggage. All the luggage came off the carousel except his. I was walking around looking for it, and saw an airline employee pulling a nearly identical bags to his. I asked her if it was hers and she said it wasn't--someone had left it and she was trying to call the owner based on the phone number on the luggage tag. Thank goodness, she was able to reach out to this guy b/c he took Eric's bag by accident and was on his way driving home. We ended up having to wait about 30+ minutes for him to come back to the airport to return Eric's luggage.

Finally, after that, we went to the shuttle area. There was some weirdness there that caused a delay (not really sure what or if they were just running on "island time") so we had to wait another 30 minutes for the shuttle. By then, it was about 10pm EST time, and the kids were pooped. Piper and Deke fell asleep the second we got in the van.

The drive to the hotel took about 30 minutes. We checked in, had a beautiful ocean view room, got some dinner at one of the quick service restaurants to eat in the room, and immediately after, we all headed to bed. So all in all, a good, adventurous travel day.