Spring Break in Hawaii, T-minus 6 days.

If you are friends with me on Facebook or follow me on Twitter, you’ve likely already grown tired of hearing about the trip to Hawaii that I’m taking next weekend.  If you’re not, well, then maybe you’ll actually be interested in this post.  I’m hoping to do sort of a travel blog about the trip while I’m there (including plenty of pictures), so I thought I would start with a post before I go about how this trip came about and what has been planned for it.

Sometime shortly after I started this semester, I started already thinking about spring break.  I’m not sure how much time off I will get from school this year, so I thought maybe it might be a good idea to take advantage of time off while I get it.  I didn’t think Ricky would be interested in going with me, since he pretty much already had his vacation planned out for the year, so I thought I would be going by myself, and among my destinations (all somewhere warmer than here) were San Francisco or San Diego.  I thought at first I would only be planning for a shorter trip of only a few days.  I got to thinking more about it, and decided… hmm… if I’m going as far as California, why not think a little bigger?  Hawaii has always seemed like a fun place, and somewhere I’d like to go someday – why not see how much it costs and go for it?

And the planning began.  The more I researched Hawaii, the more I wanted to go there.  So I decided to go, whether it meant only a few days by myself there, or, as it turned out, a week there with Ricky.  I was able to talk him into using up some of his precious vacation time for a week with me in paradise.  (Wouldn’t you go too??)

We started out deciding to only go to Oahu, and to stay near Waikiki (our hotel is only a 5-minute walk from the beach) and rent a car to explore the rest of the island during our stay.  Since then, however, we’ve ended up splurging and paying for a flight to the “big island” (Hawaii) to see the volcanoes on one day of our trip.  Other plans include a luau on Wednesday night (what better way to spend St. Patrick’s Day?) and a trip to Ocean’s 808 on Friday night.

I simply could not be more excited.  Hawaii has been a dream of mine since I was a kid.  I wrote a report about it for school in 5th grade, which my mom found the other day.  My family never traveled much or went on too many vacations, so to me, getting to explore as many places as I have the opportunity to now as an adult is simply a dream come true, something I never imagined I would be able to do.

Another fun part of the trip that we are planning to do is visit some LOST filming locations.  Most of the TV show LOST is filmed on Oahu, and we plan on hunting down some of the locations they have filmed and seeing some of these places that we have only previous seen on screen.  Yes, I realize we are dorks.  But if you are a true LOST fan, is there really anything much cooler than getting your picture taken in Dharmaville?  (You can actually see “Dharmaville”, or the Others camp, on Google Maps Street View here.  It’s a YMCA camp on Honolulu, Camp Erdman.)

So we are steadily counting down the days (as of today, only 6 left!) until we hop on that plane and take our three-leg, sixteen-hour journey to paradise.  Can I make it through this week without exploding with anticipation?  We’ll see… but on Saturday morning, paradise here I come!