Planning and Pre-Travel
Preamble
This trip has existed in our minds as early as 2012. When planning our wedding, I mentioned only wanting a small ceremony (i.e. super small – just the two of us) in a faraway place, primed for relaxation and intimacy with little wedding convention. Rick wanted a small - but formal - wedding with family. It being clear which option would carry more weight, we happily opted for the latter with the grand bargain being that we would honor my wedding vision for our fifth anniversary.
So here we are, five years later, starting our adventurous? relaxing? blissful? first/second honeymoon in Maui, Hawaii. We’ve decided to take notes of this trip to share with family and friends and to take notes for ourselves, recognizing that the older we get the more our minds leak. As an especially frequent traveler in my teens and early 20s, I was often given the advice to journal as I went, but impetuous and stubborn as I was (am…?) I shrugged off this advice with an all-knowing smile, thinking the work to do so was too time-consuming and my memory would serve me well enough to last a lifetime. And though in general I find this to be true – I can still easily float back to the places I’ve been lucky enough to live and visit - it’s the details I miss. I have lost the vivid descriptions I could once detail with my eyes closed, and small quips and anecdotes have left me except when I may stumble upon them by chance in an old e-mail.
So, in learning from earlier mistakes, we are keeping a trip report of sort this time around, the better with which to share our travels with anyone bored and/or interested enough in weeding through my verbosity to follow along. I’ve come to terms with the fact that in my 30 years that I’m mostly mute verbally and (very apologetically) long-winded by hand, so you may want to work on your skimming skills…
If we have learned anything in our 4+ years as parents, it is that our support system is our most amazing, resource on which we draw so much strength and support. We are so fortunate to have a team of people who love us and our kids (and inexplicably even Fat Anna) and I would be remiss in not being able to begin this report without giving them due credit. Rick’s parents, in particular, have graciously helped make this dream of a vacation a reality for us in so many ways, not least of which by taking care of Joey and Jay for a week. We are so grateful and appreciative to their love and support. My brother and sister-in-law, too, who are taking care of the kids for three days next week are being so generous in their time and resources to help us out, which we appreciate so much.
Planning this trip in seriousness began around the New Year, when I began scouring the internet for information. After first deciding on which island to visit (a feat in itself), I quickly became overwhelmed by the sheer quantity of information on Hawaii, and Maui in particular, and my reaction was to read as much as possible. Unfortunately, I have an interesting personality combination by being almost equal parts absent-minded but also oddly drawn toward planning, organization and details. And though my planning switch is something I can easily turn on or off (my parents and friends can recite for you many times in my life where planning was of little import...), the absent-mindedness remains, though I’ve taken steps to combat it (and by steps I mean lists. Lots and lots of lists.) As a result, this unique combination means that I can present you with a beautiful, detailed itinerary of things to do and places to eat, but I also may lose the car keys so it’s best to be flexible, am I right? In other words, I research and organize a lot ahead of time but prefer to plan for opportunities, not itineraries. So with that in mind, our trip begins...
Wednesday, July 26
Flights were considerably cheaper ($200 per ticket) flying Thursday – Friday in lieu of Friday-Friday, when our accommodations were already set. So before purchasing airline tickets I priced out the additional cost of a day for the car rental, plus a night at another hotel and extra meals, and it was clear that a Thursday arrival would still be far and away cheaper (and of course, came with the added bonus of an extra Hawaiian sunset…), so that’s what we booked.
Maybe my 30s will finally mark my long-overdue triumph over procrastination, because for this trip, for the first time, I had finally started and completed my battery of cleaning and packing to-do lists enough in advance to be able to relax on the morning of departure. The kids and I went to the playground before heading home for some last minute packing (ok so maybe someprocrastination still lingers) before feasting on a lunch of macaroni and cheese and heading out the door. After sad goodbyes (except for Jay, who was much more preoccupied with excuse-me-but-when-exactly-am-I-going-to-the-pool-priorities) in Bethesda, I headed down the beltway to Dulles. Parenthood holds a strange paradox wherein I spent the better part of this year counting down with unbridled anticipation to the exact time of departure – longing for uninterrupted solitude and settled thoughts - but when the time comes to say goodbye I am overcome with grief and longing. Driving down the beltway the car was so eerily quiet I almost missed the pleas for snacks, books, and/or “Pacito” (Joey’s pronunciation of the song Despacito… oh J.Biebs the hold your music has on our 4 year old is already alarming). I reflected that though I still had several errands to run and a long list of “to-dos” to complete before many others’ would say vacation begins, for me – a stay at home parent of two young children - this moment held a special kind of both melancholy, but also blissful freedom. Vacation begins!
I took a brief stop to get a spray-on tan. I am not proud of this but listen people, I am so pale that I literally repel the sun with glare. I have a.) no interest in cancer or sun poisoning or spending my vacation unable to freely move my limbs due to scalding and b.) I can’t just go to a beach paradise and run the risk of blinding people with my translucent Welsh skin, so my best option is stepping into a chemically-filled chamber of bronzer. After getting my wonderfully-smelling-just-ask-Rick tan (and by tan I mean like 2 shades darker than normal so still very pale), I made my way to our Chantilly hotel. Our flights left early in the morning (7:25am) so I also did a price comparison for a hotel the night before (Wednesday night). Because the metro wouldn’t be open early enough to be an option, and because we were flying back into a different airport and couldn’t leave the car, our best option was a cab or Uber. An Uber would be about $70-80, but I was able to find and book a decent hotel near the airport with a 24/7 airport shuttle for $65/night from Priceline at 50% off the list price. Not only was it cheaper than taking a car, it also meant we didn’t have to wake up at 3am for a 4am pick-up, so we were sold. When not using points, I often manipulate the Priceline “Name your price” and “Express Deal” bidding features to book hotel deals. I isolate features, amenities, class (5 star, 4 star, etc.) and neighborhoods to determine price points and inventories of hotels. I then use price comparisons with the Express Deals list to bid in a way that I know exactly which hotel I will book (in what is supposed to be a blind process) and likely what the lowest price accepted would be (generally 10% less than the Express Deal). Et voila – a hotel at half the price.
After an easy check-in but a bit of a snafu with the room keys, I spent approximately two minutes in the hotel room to drop off our luggage (no rush hour metro ride with suitcases for me) before dashing out to the car again to try and get beat the notoriously terrible 495 rush-hour crawl. Well, my friends, I failed. In a test of fate:
Fate: I don’t think you appreciate vacation enough.
Me: No, I do. I do.
Fate: Let’s give you standstill traffic on the beltway… I’m talking 5 miles in 1h15 kind of traffic to make you really appreciate leaving tomorrow.
As soon as I was over the Potomac (i.e. not confined to only 2 route options) I zoomed through the “back roads” of southwestern Montgomery County to Wheaton, zipped into Target to pick up camera card, camera bag, tin foil, and – ooooh are those peanut butter M&Ms 25% off?? – those too, and then ran home to clean the coffee maker, put away the dishes, surface vacuum the house, turn off the air conditioning, and lock up everything in 30 minutes flat. Never underestimate the productive power of a parent recently freed from the slowing confines of her two pint-sized sidekicks.
Walking to the metro, I was finally cleared of a to-do list. I met up with Rick, who had been waiting out my beltway hold up at work, and we continued on our public transit journey together out to beautiful Chantilly, VA. By this time it was almost 9pm and we discovered that all appealing dinner places closed up at 9. Google finally led us to the Backyard Grill, a mere half mile from our hotel, so that is where we directed our Uber upon emerging from the underground. We ordered a couple of beers (when I asked the waitress if she had a stout or porter on tap, she said “Ummm Guinness?... I think that’s the closest thing we have to a stout.” Girl, what? Guinness is the king of stouts…) and dug into a later dinner of predictably average (Rick got a burger, I got a salad and creamy spinach dip), if not cheap (Virginia!) and satisfying meal. After finishing up, we drifted back over the decidedly-not-pedestrian-friendly-streets of Northern Virginia and fell asleep to the late night talk shows. We both vowed to a 3:30 wake up call to exercise before leaving the next morning at 4:55am.
