Planning 1 | Planning 2 | Planning 3 | Travel | Disneyland  (Day 1 – Day 2 – Day 3 – Day 4) | Arrival | Surfing | Aulani | Excursion | Hyatt

After spending two days at the Hilton Hawaiian Village, it was time to head out for Aulani.  We couldn’t check in there until the afternoon, so we thought we would plan a fun day.  We headed up towards the North Shore.  Our first stop was at some shops just south of Haleiwa.  The girls were looking for souvenirs, but all we managed to find was some chickens.

After our stop, we continue on towards Haleiwa for some lunch.  We found Haleiwia Joe’s and decided to eat there.  The service and food were really good.  We sat near the window and enjoyed the view.  I had bbq sliders and Nancy had fish tacos. 

After lunch, we headed towards Chun’s Reef Beach for our next stop.  We had set up a surprise surf lesson for the girls with the North Shore Surf Girls.  We had first heard about them from a post that Kenny the Pirate had done based on his trip to Hawaii that he took in 2015  We thought the girls might really enjoy taking a surf lesson while on Oahu.  We had made a point to get them rash guards the day before just to be prepared for the lesson.  We had all gotten sunburned while in Waikiki and we didn’t want it to impact their lesson too much if we could help it.  Plus we didn’t want them getting even more burned while spending a few hours on the water.

The girls didn’t know about the surf lessons — in fact, we didn’t even tell them until we arrived at Chun’s Beach.  They were truly surprised!  We had booked a semi private lesson for two that cost $129 per hour.  We met our instructor and she took the girls down towards the water for their initial instructions.  While still on the beach, they learned how to paddle the board as well as how to pop up and stand when they were catching the wave.  After about fifteen minutes, they were headed out into the water.

The girls then spent the next two hours riding waves.  The boards they were using were really large, so I don’t think it was incredibly difficult.  The instructor was super great with them and both the girls loved her.  She  really focused on them and helped them as opposed to just being out there with them.  There were tons of locals at the beach as well.  Many of them gave the girls lots of encouraging words as they were learning.  The girls were smiling from ear to ear the whole time!  They were able to easily catch tons of waves and got some fairly long rides in.  The girls were exhausted when they were done though. 

Nancy and I could have easily have worn our suits and spent the time in the water, but we were a bit over cooked from the day before.  We instead spent the afternoon sitting under the North Shore Surf Girls’ canopy to stay out of the sun, popping out for a few minutes at the time to take pictures of the girls.  We have tons of great pictures, including several from a local photographer that the instructor had in the water (Greg Rose of Waterlogged Productions).  His pictures were available for a fairly low price if we wanted to purchase them.  We bought them after looking at a few and gave him a tip since he got lots of pictures we never would have.  Our general policy is to not publish identifiable pictures of the girls though, so here are a few of the ones we could share!

We got the sand off the girls and headed back to the car.  We were headed for our six night stay at Aulani!

 

 

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