Our Hawaii Vacation!

My Family and I just got back from a fantastic Hawaii vacation! Two and a half weeks of fun in the sun and adventures we will never forget. To cover everything in one post would be hard so I am sure there will be several posts about all the things we did. This is the first time we have traveled with all our whole family, with 4 kids it's quite spendy to travel out of Juneau as a matter of fact this is the first time Hunter and Hayden had even been on a plane and they are almost 6 and their excitement was very contagious.

So step one to any vacation packing! Now being this is the first time we have done this needless to say I was quite overwhelmed with preparing all of us for this trip. But when all was said and done I got us down to 4 suitecases and a backpack for each of us to carry on the plane.

We are very lucky to have a great friend who works for Alaska Airlines that we took this vacation with and we flew on her passes for this fabulous trip. (Thank you Monica you are the best) One of the drawbacks flying this way is you have to fly standby, which means you stand the chance of getting to the airport all ready to go with the possibility that you will get bumped from the flight. And considering we were traveling with 4 adults and 8 children between our two families that possiblity was very high, but considering we were flying for free we didn't complain. We were looking at this as an adventure because who knew what city we would end up in on our way to our final destination, we were determined to just enjoy every minute of this time with eachother. I must say Monica is very good at planning though cause we went to and from Hawaii without getting bumped from a single flight we planned on catching and Justin and I even got to sit in first class a couple of times which definatley was a bonus :) Another perk of traveling this way is your travel dates are "flexible" based on flight loads, so on the first leg of our trip there was an open window of flights so Monica and 3 of her kids and Hunter, Hayden and I left 2 days earlier then the rest of the gang as the older boys had to stay in town to finish SBA testing at school! Bummer for them haha :) So off we went to the airport to start our long journey to Maui.

Hayden was very excited but cautious as always about what it was going to be like flying in an airplane. He had lots of questions for the flight crew and was a little scared after looking over the emergency evacutation card!

Hunter on the other hand was a ball of fire ready to get moving so excited about his first ride in and airplane!

We started out leaving at 8:05 from Juneau and had to overnight in Seattle we only had 5 hours though so we decided to stay at that airport. So after numerous bathroom breaks and I'm not tired stories we finally got them all to sleep in the terminal at Sea-Tac needless to say Monica and I didn't get much sleep on the airport floor the boys slept really well !

After 4 hours of little to no sleep for mom we woke the boys to catch our early flight to Portland, that was a short flight and took no time at all. Then on to Maui what a long flight that was 5 1/2 hours but the boys did fantastic and were all very good on all the flights. We landed at noon in Maui and it was all worth it to feel the warm tropical air and the smell of the flowers filled the air! The boys were needless to say extatic about our arrival.

stay tuned for more to come!