Wanderlust Wednesdays: Oahu 2015 Day 1

Two weeks ago I took a mini trip to Hawaii to not only get some much needed r&r but also to celebrate my friend's dirty 30! It was a short trip but since I have been going every year since graduation, we weren't planning on doing anything crazy touristy so it was very relaxing.

It was my first time flying to Hawaii on United and it was less than stellar but I was able to get to Honolulu at 11:30am so it was a good trade off. I usually fly on Hawaiian or Alaska and most all flights fly out of San Diego at 9 or 10am so you don't get to Hawaii until 2-3pm so you lose some precious time to get settled. I started off the day flying from San Diego at 6:20am to LA and then transferred to a jumbo plane to fly to Honolulu. We were delayed for about 30 minutes. On the plane, they ran out of hot food so I was pretty much starving by the time we landed. Luckily, my friends were on the same wave length so we headed to Curry House. Noms. Got too hungry to take pictures but curry never really looks too appetizing lol.

After lunch we went to the store to purchase some snacks and beverages before heading to Aulani. It was the first time we stayed during the start of the busy season so it was crazy to see so many people there. We checked in and our room wasn't ready so to continue the #YOLO tradition of these trips, we headed to the bar. We were lucky enough to grab a seat and some desserts on the Mouse!

Treats from the Mouse included chocolate cake, macarons, chocolate dipped strawberries and pineapple pound cake. I don't have a sweet tooth but I still enjoyed all of it!

While we were enjoying our drinks, we got a text that our room was ready so we headed to the front desk and we were placed in room 842. This was the first time we got an Ocean View room and let me just say it was worth every penny. The view is absolutely beautiful. If you're going on your honeymoon and plan on spending a decent amount of time in the room *wink wink*, know that you aren't missing much. Enjoy a sip of coffee or a cocktail from your balcony. Make sure you head down to the infinity pool to watch the sunset since it's something you won't be able to see from this side of the resort.

We unpacked our stuff and changed into our swimwear and headed to the nearby beach to try to spot some sea turtles which I've missed every time I've been. Unfortunately even though it was high tide around 5pm, there were no turtles so we headed back to Aulani to enjoy the lazy pool.

The day was coming to an end so we went to the community center to borrow 2 movies and headed out to grab dinner. We were going to grab shabu shabu but the wait was close to 45 minutes (on a Thursday!) so we opted to grab boba and Aiea Bowl to-go. Twas delicious and we called it a night since I had been up for almost 24 hours.

Stay tuned for Day 2 on Oahu!

Wanderlust Wednesday: Traveler's Notebook

As I mentioned in a previous post, I'll be doing some traveling in June and I really wanted to document my travels thru the use of a traveler's notebook. Instead of collecting a bunch of trinkets to put into a scrapbook when I return home from vacation (which ends up sitting in a shoe box under the bed collecting dust), I'll be taking my traveler's notebook with me and creating this scrapbook as I travel.

This will be my first traveler's notebook so I actually made it using a small address book that came with my Mother's Organizer planner that I got at CVS. I really like the size of it because it's slightly larger than the regular midori traveler's notebooks that you can find on Amazon giving you a little more space for "regular" sized photos (i.e. 4x6) rather than just the Instax photos. As you can see below, the entire book is just used for addresses but who really uses an address book these days? Instead of recycling it, I decided to tape over the majority of it to my liking.

I used this cardstock paper I bought at Michael's with one of their 40% off coupons. I had been looking into a reason to use this paper so it was perfect.

Here are a few samples of the paper I used to cover up the address pages. I basically repeated this patterned papered twice. The book came out to 17 pages.

I started working on the cover as well as some of the pages inside the book so that there would be a starting point once I was on the trip. The cover was just a paper bag that I wrapped over the address book. The stickers are mostly Mambi stickers that I picked up from Michael's. You can see what the stickers looked like in the packaging in this post. I used 3 stickers from the Mambi sticker packs: the airplane, the "destination" sticker, and the suit case. The 4 little strips were from a travel Mambi pack that I bought a long long time ago so I'm not sure if it is still available.

When you open up the notebook, I have a Hawaii foam sticker from a Recollections sticker set and the flower is also from another Recollections sticker set. On the left hand side where I have the brown paper bag, I want to put a little pocket for any keepsakes that just don't fit into the theme of the notebook.

For the second page, I had picked a background paper from the cardstock stack and I didn't really like how it looked since it was on the busier side so I cut out part of this map of Oahu (free from AAA if you have a membership) of the Ko'olina area where I'll be staying.

I really love how this page came out so I got a close up :D.

On the right side of the map I left some blank space *wink wink nudge nudge* (T swizzle reference). I wanted to be able to remember the date that I'm leaving for Hawaii so I put down a little date sticker as well as a Thursday tabby on the side. I'll probably jot down some notes on my flight to Hawaii and maybe include my boarding pass. Since this will be a straight up be a vegetable trip for us, we don't have an itinerary planned so I won't be decorating anything else in the notebook.

To hold all the stickers and embellishments I'll be using on my trip, I bought this photo album from Walmart. Here are some of the stickers I was able to fit into the album and bring with me to Hawaii.

Hope you guys enjoyed this post! Please let me know if you'd like to see more of these posts!

Thanks so much for reading and planning along with me!