icedlatte.com

So, we’re back from our vacation, and it’s back to work. That is always a suck, but what are you going to do?

I thought it would be good to have a travel blog about our trip. We did a lot of interesting and fun things, and I wanted to document it for posterity, and to get comments on what other people did, and maybe ideas for our next trip.

Continue reading to read all about it!

Trip Planning

So our trip was going to be 1 week in Maui for our 10th wedding anniversary, which is June 10th.  We planned to be in Maui from June 8th until the 15th.

Since we were staying in my Aunt & Uncle’s condo, we didn’t need to worry about hotel there.  So that left two things:  Airfare & car rental.

I started looking for airfare right away, but I limited my choices:

1. I wanted to fly a widebody to Hawaii.  A lot of airlines are now flying narrowbodies to Hawaii.  US Airways, for example, flies the 757 out of Phoenix.  Alaska flies a 737.  Yes, the same plane that Southwest flies.  That a long flight for that.
2. Wanted to avoid US Airways, even though we both had a frequent flier account with them.  The buy on board, or buy anything, for that matter, is just a little much for me.

So that narrowed down our choices to a few of the majors.  (Such as United, Delta, and Hawaiian.)

After pricing out different itineraries, I narrowed it down to Hawaiian Airlines.  They’ve always received excellent reviews, and they fly the  widebody 767.  They also fly nonstop out of Phoenix to Honolulu.

But when I started pricing the tickets, it was going to be almost $1,200.  That seemed a little high to me.  They also started to run out of window seats on the flight out of Phoenix, so it started making me worried.

But, score!  Turns out that Hawaiian Airlines was starting a new nonstop out of Oakland, CA.  To Maui.  And it started 2 days before we were planning to go to Hawaii.

So, for the grand total of $650 for two, we had tickets to Maui.  Now the only issue was getting to Oakland.  Enter Southwest Airlines.  A cheap fare a few days before, and it all worked out.

Of course, our High School friends live in downtown SF, so that all worked out.

Check out the next part for our pre-Maui San Francisco adventure!