Last night, I arrived back in Austin on the longest-haul flight currently operating into the airport: Hawaiian Airlines 82. That nearly eight-hour flight culminated an adventure that started on May 26th, spanning four islands (the Big Island, Maui, Oahu and Kauai) over, once you took out the mainland travel days, eight days.
The adventure, which had been talked about off and on for months, came together rather quickly in the end; things only started getting booked in early May as our original schedule got moved up due to some work stuff on my side (I'll post more info about that on my Twitter soon). This meant that we were traveling on rather short notice (particularly for a Hawaii trip), over Memorial Day, during a time of flux for travel restrictions. Tourist activity was starting to heat up, putting some strain on areas that were still in "pandemic mode," but in many cases crowds were light enough that booking some events at late notice wasn't a problem. Point being, if you tried to recreate our experience a month from now, you'd have a quite different experience.
Nonetheless, slicing our trip along a few different axes seems like it may be useful to some, for a variety of reasons. I'll set up a post for each slice...so far here's the list:
- COVID restrictions, testing, etc.
- Air travel
- Ground transportation (bus, shuttle, car rental...and zero rideshare)
- Lodging (4 nights across two hotels, 5 nights across three Airbnbs)
- Food
- Cellular service
- Activities (one post per island)
I'll use the "fourislandseightdays" topic tag to group all of these posts, so you'll be able to catch all of my posts there. If you have questions about a given topic, comment on that topic. For more general questions, comment here.
To answer the most obvious question, "would you do it the same way again, in similar circumstances" my answer would be "absolutely," albeit with some relatively minor schedule/activity modifications based on 20-20 hindsight. I'll point out those tweaks over the upcoming posts. Yes, this includes the frenetic two-day-per-island schedule, even though there's plenty of stuff we didn't get a chance to see on each island.
"Do you plan on going back?" Probably. Likely two islands rather than four on the next trip, but the island-hopping aspect wasn't too much of a liability, so I'd actually keep some of that aspect. Though it's going to be awhile before I take that amount of time out again (see aforementioned work thing).
Anyway, onward to the first topic: navigating COVID restrictions in the one US state that, aided by easily defensible borders, is taking them quite seriously.