In just about two days, we will be taking off from Minneapolis International Airport for our 9 day vacation in Hawaii!

You don’t even want to know how many times I’ve made packing lists… the current working number is 5, but I’m sure I’ve left something off and will likely go through them all again tonight.

Why Hawaii? And why in December? Well, the end of December will see our 25th wedding anniversary, and we wanted to go somewhere we’d both really enjoy. That left out more exotic locations such as Egypt, although with the current war in Gaza, that’s not a bad thing! We’re leaving on the 1st of December so we wouldn’t be on vacation over the Christmas and New Year holidays. Since our daughter won’t be joining us, we decided it wouldn’t be nice to leave her alone for those!

We’re staying on the big island the entire time. Right now, the only thing we have that’s actually scheduled is a star-gazing tour with an Astro-photographer on Saturday night. He has a refund or reschedule policy if there are clouds, so we scheduled it early in the trip in case we needed to reschedule. We’ve gotten an Airbnb that’s in the village of Volcano, situated basically in the rainforest. At least it looks that way both from the photos and my own looking at maps surrounding it. We’re three miles from the main entrance to the national park, where we expect to spend a good portion of our time.

On the list of things to see or do are, in no particular order, whale watching, black sand beach, green sand beach, luau, lava tube hike, zip lining, visiting a winery, farmer’s markets… and eating pineapple. Some of this is very much in the air right now because there’s kind of a tropical depression dumping rain on the big island right now. Forecast says it should be clear by Tuesday, so fingers crossed! Lots of rain could mean many things won’t be available to us, which would make me sad, but since I have no pull with Mother Nature, I just have to live with what she dishes out.

More later!