National Parks and Recreation

I did something kind of crazy a few months ago. I know it looks like we travel all the time and are just constantly hopping on planes on a whim to jet set across the continent. But the truth is, each one of our trips is meticulously planned, scheduled and budgeted for MONTHS. Oh the spreadsheets I could show you. We also need to contend with James’ vacation days, which get used a LOT during hockey season, so we have to be pretty deliberate and strategic in how we book our trips. That being said, all of that went out the window for this one.

Let’s back up a little bit. Growing up, my mom had a Disney timeshare that allowed us to go on cruises every 3 years or so and it was our absolute favorite vacation to take.

The above picture is from the last cruise we got to go on together back in 2016 before she got too sick to go. So Disney Cruises have always had a special place in my heart. Fast forward to late December 2024 when the Disney Treasure, the newest ship in the fleet, was released and I knew a couple of travel bloggers who were invited on the maiden voyage. I was inundated for a week straight with Disney Cruise content on my timeline and the wheels started turning.

Mind you, we had JUST gotten back from two weeks in Europe and, while I may be funemployed at the moment, my husband very much isn’t. But it still can’t hurt to just click around on the Disney Cruise website and see what’s out there. And that’s when I saw it: 30% of select cruises, including a 10-day Hawaiian cruise that island hopped for 4 days before crossing the Pacific to end in Vancouver. For DIRT cheap. That sails in two months. So I started joking with James. Never in a million years did I think we could actually pull it off, but I brought it up constantly as a joke for a week. And then one day he came home from work, told me the cruise dates would be between campaigns and that he did technically have the time off… It. Was. On.

This is by far the most spontaneous trip I’ve taken that isn’t a last-minute hockey trip when BU inevitably makes the regionals out in Minnesota. To pull together a 10-day, 3-island vacation in two months was a dream for me. And exactly what I needed after coming down from the high of the Europe trip. Luckily, flights were also very reasonable. Boston direct to Honolulu for $300? Yes, please. This was the longest flight I’d ever been on (about 11 hours) and I was surprised at how easy it was. It flew by! (hah) I’ve always resigned myself to the fact that I’ll probably never get to go to Australia because I couldn’t handle the flights, but I think I could do it!

So anyway, there we were, just two months after discovering this cruise even existed, landing in Honolulu just in time to watch the sunset on Waikiki Beach.

Peep Diamond Head in the background. We would be climbing that at sunrise the next morning.

We had about 20 hours total in Honolulu and we certainly made the most of it!

The good thing about the 5 hour time difference is that it made it easy for us very much not morning people to get up at the crack of dawn and start exploring every day. And allowed us to cram a bunch of stuff into our morning on O’ahu.

After watching the sunrise from Diamond Head (which I highly recommend!) we hopped on the bus to go across the city to Pearl Harbor National Memorial.

The grounds were absolutely beautiful and they’ve done such a good job of laying out the history of the war and that fateful day.

And it was a quick ferry ride out to the USS Arizona to see the memorial site.

Seeing the ship’s wreckage right below us was really interesting. My grandfather joined the Navy and fought in the Pacific after the events at Pearl Harbor and it was pretty easy to see how all these young men were spurred to action after what they saw.

After an exhausting and somber morning, it was finally time for us to board the boat and (more importantly) start eating!

But we’ll definitely be back, O’ahu! (Maybe to do the Hawaii – Australia leg of this cruise someday…..) I can’t wait to explore more of the North Shore and, of course, do all of the Lost tours. Dharma stations, I know you’re out there!

Alas, this is a blog about national parks…so it’s time I actually start talking about them. Still on East Coast time, I woke up bright and early the next morning and headed to the top deck to see if we had arrived in Maui yet. And I got there just in time to see the sun rising over Haleakalā. Haleakalā translates to house of the rising sun, because almost no matter where you are on Maui, you will see the sun rise from behind this majestic volcano. So what a gift for my first experience with Haleakalā to be watching the titular rising sun.

After (finally) waking James up and grabbing some breakfast…Mickey waffles of course…it was time for us to go ashore.

I surprised James with a helicopter ride (I figured we never know when/if we’ll make it back to Hawaii so we might as well do it all) to start our time in (mostly overtop) Haleakalā National Park. This was both of our first times in a helicopter and I have often said that they scare me more than skydiving. Taking off was definitely the worst part, but then I settled in and it wasn’t so bad. I think I’ll definitely be much less scared next time now that I know what to expect. We got front row seats so I have SO many amazing photos and videos that you can check out on my Instagram!

And then, after seeing it from the air, it was time for us to drive up to the summit of Haleakalā ourselves. She stands at just over 10,000 feet in elevation (which is impressive in its own right), but you also have to remember that we start at sea level. So we climbed all 10,000 feet from Kahului to the summit in just over an hour.

And we probably should have taken our time. We later learned that the people who did the bus tours to the top were forced to get out two separate times and walk around for 10-15 minutes to slowly adjust to the altitude. We…did not do that. We drove straight from 0 to 10,000 and then immediately started hiking. I’m sorry I’m like this.

I think my thought process was that it usually takes about 2-3 days for altitude sickness to really set in with me (sometimes overnight if it’s particularly high) so I would be totally fine just going up for an afternoon. And mostly we were. Nobody got sick or anything, but we were definitely FEELING it on that hike. James was pretty short of breath and my heart was pounding so hard I was pretty sure I was minutes from cardiac arrest, but we took it slow and the good thing about altitude sickness? There is a near immediate cure for it. Get to lower ground.

But I’m getting ahead of myself.

Once we got up above the clouds, there were volcanic rocks everywhere! Kind of cool (and scary) to think about how they got there. (I was smart enough to wait until after our trip to watch that New Zealand volcano documentary on Netflix. Yikes.) What I also love about the above picture is how you can see all the different terrains of Hawaii in one shot. The rocky, volcanic desert at the bottom, the green farmlands middle left, the lush rainforests middle right, and the big, beautiful ocean out to the horizon.

We decided to start the Sliding Sands trail, an 18 mile one-way trail across the Haleakalā crater and just hike for as long as we wanted/had time for/could breath and successfully pump blood through our bodies for, and then head back.

And the views at the rim of the crater were out of this world! Literally.

I could have stared out at the Mars-like landscape for hours. Definitely worth the lack of oxygen. (Also much like Mars!)

In the below picture, you can see the trail we followed. It wasn’t too steep or anything, it was just super exposed to the elements. All in all, we hiked about one mile out (a little past where you can see in that picture) and then turned around and came back. But let me tell you, it felt much longer! Highly recommend.

Also in the above picture, you can see the Big Island in the background. We would be there in a few days! Mauna Kea is on the left, the highest point in Hawaii at 13,803 feet, and Mauna Loa (13,679 feet) is on the right. The clouds you see on top of Mauna Kea aren’t part of any eruption, they’re just clouds, she’s been dormant for thousands of years. Mauna Loa, on the other hand, is the largest active volcano on Earth and last erupted in 2022 (there were no injuries and very minimal property damage). HOWEVER, Kīlauea, the main volcano in the center of Hawaii Volcanoes National Park, is actively erupting right now and began doing so right around the time I booked this cruise. But that’s a story for next week when I post about our time in that park! (Though you can see the steam from that activity in between Mauna Kea and Mauna Loa. Kīlauea is further away and much smaller (4,091 feet) than the others.) It was cool to get a sneak preview of what we’d be seeing in a couple of days!

But back to Haleakalā. Heart arms!

From the Sliding Sands trail, we drove the last half mile up to the actual summit. We were still over an hour out from sunset, but the lot was already starting to fill up and we got lucky.

Have to get that geological marker pic!

The summit was cool, but the views are a thousand times better at the visitor center half a mile down. We also knew we didn’t want to stay all the way up at the top for sunset because we had “free” dinner to catch down on the boat and wanted to start our descent at least a little bit. So we headed back down the mountain, pulling over just before we reached the cloud line and hanging out as we edited photos and watched the sun go down.

It was a pretty perfect day on Maui.

We got up bright and early yet again to reunite with our rental car and begin the infamous Road to Hana. If you aren’t familiar, the Road to Hana is a 64.4 mile long road from Kahului to Hana that cuts through the rainforest and skirts along steep ocean cliffs. It has approximately 620 hairpin turns and almost 50 one-lane bridges as you cut through the rainforest. Because of this, the drive takes nearly 3 hours and is certainly not for the faint of heart.

Obviously, I loved it! There are some sketchy moments, but as long as you go slow and stay alert at all times, you’ll be fine. The closest we got to getting in an accident was on a huge straight away where a guy in an SUV just started drifting over into my lane for no reason at all. So yeah, it was fine. You can definitely spend days doing this and stopping everywhere along the way, but we had one day left on the island and knew we needed to save time for our destination: the other side of Haleakalā National Park.

You can see more pictures from this drive on my Instagram, but here are a few highlights. The black sand beach at Waiʻānapanapa State park is above (and was probably our favorite stop).

And then there’s these really cool rainbow eucalyptus trees. We kind of lucked into seeing this because I was driving behind a tour bus at this point (which I actually liked doing because it felt safer and then any time they slowed down or stopped we knew there was probably something interesting to look at). Case in point: this guy was just chilling on the side of the road. This photo doesn’t do justice to how colorful it actually was.

After our hours long drive through the jungle, we finally arrived at the back side of Haleakalā National Park and the Kīpahulu Visitor Center. This part of the park was MUCH different from the summit. Goodbye to the cool, dry, thin mountain air and hello to the hot, wet, sticky slop that was the rainforest.

We started by walking around ‘Ohe’o Gulch which is unfortunately closed to swimmers now because humans suck, but it was still cool to see the pools of water. Levels were pretty low, though, as they hadn’t gotten rain in a bit.

These pools also drain into yet another black sand beach. I never got sick of these! Volcanoes, man.

I’m not going to lie, morale was getting pretty low by this point. We knew we had a three-hour harrowing drive back and I cannot express to you how hot and humid it was. Maybe if we hadn’t just come from February in Boston I might have been a little more prepared, but the instant swampy air was too much. And I was being such a baby about it. But I think James secretly agreed with me.

Nevertheless, we set out on the Pipiwai Trail, one of the highest rated trails on Maui. This 3.4 mile out and back takes you through rainforests, banyan trees, bamboo forests, and ends at Waimoku Falls.

The banyan trees were…large.

A lot of the little waterfalls and pools along the way had very little water because of the dry weather, but it was still cool to see. However, our morale continued to plummet and we made the executive decision that we were not going to hike all the way to Waimoku Falls, and would instead turn around at the bamboo forest. But that’s the great thing about hiking! It’s literally about the journey, you can turn around any time you want.

And for us that day, a bamboo forest (which neither of us had seen before) and then some air conditioning was way more appealing than 2 more miles of hiking through swamp air to see a half-trickling waterfall. Priorities.

And the bamboo was COOL! It came out of nowhere and was everywhere. We frollicked through the stalks for quite some time before heading back to the car and beginning our long, winding journey back to the boat. We grabbed some food from a Thai food truck in Hana and then had just one last stop to make before saying goodbye to Maui for now: Ho’okipa Beach. And most importantly, the sea turtles on Ho’okipa Beach!

Every night before sunset a bunch of them emerge from the ocean to bask in the sun on the beach. There’s an overlook where you can safely watch them and you can also get pretty close to them on the beach, just don’t be an asshole and cross into the roped off area.

They were so cool! This was also the first time either of us had seen sea turtles. Our table mates said they saw a bunch while snorkeling the day before and that would’ve been so cool. Next time!

From there, we finished our trek back to the port and made it to the boat well before our all-aboard time, but more importantly, just in time for this crazy cool sunset pic! Hawaii was blowing my already super high expectations out of the water.

I’m so incredibly blessed to be able to afford these trips. I’m lucky I found and married someone who is as good a saver as I am and who is also content to live a minimal life in our everyday so that we can splurge on these amazing adventures. I also use travel credit cards (I have two that I spend $700 in annual fees on) and points to really help us pull these trips off for as cheap as possible. There are ten million Youtube videos you can watch about this, but I highly recommend!

And I also want to acknowledge the help I got from my mother’s passing to make this specific trip possible. Obviously, I would give it all back for just five more minutes with her, but I think it’s important to acknowledge the privilege I have. So shoutout to my mother! For making me fall in love with travel. For turning me into a Disney Cruisehead. And for having your life insurance check arrive right as I found this cruise deal. I know you would approve. I saw you in all of our secret spots and heard you muttering under your breath that there were too many damn kids on this boat.

That’s all from Haleakalā! Check back next week as I regale stories and photos from our time atop an active volcano on the Big Island in Hawaii Volcanoes National Park.