Taryn's Mad Hatter Adventures

7/30-31/24

I was so excited to be going on this trip of a lifetime with my mom and two daughters. It was upon her request, as it’s something she has always wanted to do. The CruiseTour consisted of a land portion from July 31-August 3, and then a cruise from August 3-August 10. The land portion had tours to the following: Dole Plantation and Polynesian Cultural Center, Pearl Harbor and Downtown, and Scenic South Shore and Kualoa Ranch. The cruise departed from Honolulu, with stops in Maui, Hilo, Kona, and Kauai.

I found really good flight pricing through Southwest leaving from Baltimore. We flew to Los Angeles the day before the CruiseTour started and stayed over night. My hope was to ease the 6 hour time change to Hawaii (LA would be 3 hours), and then catch an early morning flight to Honolulu from LAX on July 31.

I am my own worst client when it comes to booking legs of trips. I scrutinize every single hotel and read every possible review. I settled on the Fairfield Inn and Suites Los Angeles LAX/El Segundo. It was great! I felt 100% confident once I saw several different pilots and flight attendants board our shuttle to the hotel.

Once we got our luggage, we went towards hotel ground transportation. There was a special area for this. I did call the hotel to let them know we were there and she said we should wait no more than 15 minutes for a shuttle. It arrived, and we drove about 5-8 minutes until we reached the hotel. It was very close!

Photo of the shuttle:

The front desk staff was super helpful and friendly. Our room was on the first floor which was fine with us because we had 5 suitcases! About the room itself…it was on the small side. But it was clean and we were only sleeping there a few hours, so it was fine! Across the street is a shopping complex with several food options. We knew we were headed to In N Out!

Our flight was departing LAX at 8:05 a.m. Free breakfast was at 6:00 a.m. I was so scared of not getting to our gate in time! The free shuttle left the hotel on the hour and half hour. I felt we needed to get on the 6:00 a.m. shuttle, so we breezed through to see what was ready and grabbed whole fruit and threw it in our carry ons. It was good we did, because we only had 45 minutes once we finally got through security. They only had one lane open.

The flight to Honolulu (on Southwest) was about 6 hours. Instead of the normal two snacks, they gave us these snack packs:

Wheat thins with cheese dip, fruit snacks and a snack mix.

Upon landing in Honolulu, we were advised (through our NCL CruiseTour paperwork) to just head to baggage claim, get our baggage, and then look for the NCL staff member. We looked and looked, and looked, and could not find one anywhere! I even stopped anyone that had a badge on and asked. Several of them told me that they should be walking around shouting out. We saw no one! I even walked the entire length of the baggage claim. Finally after about 30-45 minutes, someone arrived. She checked us off a list and then passed us along to someone else. No one helped us with our luggage. They took us outside to sit and wait for the shuttle. We had four other people on the shuttle with us. Two were dropped at a different hotel, and the rest of us continued on to the Hyatt Regency Waikiki Beach Resort and Spa. This is the hotel NCL uses for the CruiseTour.

Our driver dropped us, and we had to drag our suitcases up some stairs because they were not allowed to drop us off in the front where the bellman are because it’s too busy.

I found this in the hotel!

We made our way to the front desk. Our room was ready, but it was a king. That would not work because there were four of us! She disappeared and returned and had a room with 2 queens for us.

These were some things happening around the resort:

And she also gave me this handout:

The resort was HUGE! There were two or three?? floors of shops and dining locations. The time now was 2:45 p.m. (8:45 p.m. east coast time) and we were really hungry.

Looking back at our resort from the beach:

(We LOVED having this ABC Store right in our resort!)

We decided to check out the beach quickly, and then Door Dash dinner.

It was extremely busy and crowded!

For dinner, my oldest and I went with Hawaiian BBQ and my youngest and mom went with a good old cheese pizza.

We also Door Dashed some peanut butter, jelly, and marshmallow to make sandwiches for when we were touring or needed an emergency snack!

We went to bed at 6:00 p.m. and slept until about 4:30 a.m.! None of us could stay awake any longer.

Up next…Our first day of touring!