Wow! This trip has gone by so quickly! It's hard to believe waking up this morning we knew we had to check out. But of course since we are still getting up early we had to start our day at the pool. We just had to enjoy one more morning of this amazing view! And the delicious so so fresh fruit and açaí bowl for breakfast, nothing at home is like this! Earlier in our trip, I mentioned about the wristbands you get to show you are staying on site, which enables you to use all of the amenities that Aulani has to offer. As a DVC member, those wristbands are 'sparkly' and most people leave them on their entire length of stay to 'show' how long you have been here. So on our last day, having gotten 10 wristbands (one for each day we were here), the third photo shows my 'display'! When we got home, I cut them carefully off and will put them into a Christmas ornament to display on our tree this year.
At 7am every morning we would hear this 'chant' over the speakers and no one on property could actually tell us what it was. If you turn up the volume, you can hear it in this video on our last morning.
After some relaxing time by the water, we had some items to give away. There is a great f/b community for sharing when you have items after your stay and you want to share those with others. Some items are left in the 'ice/laundry' room on each floor but if you have alcohol, you are supposed to give it directly to someone so that a minor does not obtain it. So while we did any last minute packing, we made arrangements to make someone's stay a bit brighter and dropped some food items to the ice room and met another f/b friend who took our left over alcohol. Took some photos of the little touches around the room and the amazing smelling bath products so that some day I might buy them online, lol.
We had to take one last photo on our amazing balcony before we headed out. We stopped in the lobby to drop off our luggage since we were going to go get a bite to eat before our flight and didn't want our luggage sitting in the car. Stopped to take on more photo off the lobby of course! When the valet brought our Jeep around we asked for a recommendation for lunch close by and were soon off to Island Vintage Coffee a short drive from the resort for lunch. It was delicious. After lunch, a quick fill of the gas tank at Costco and then back to get our luggage it was time to head to Honolulu Airport.
I tried to read everything about checkin at the airport since this is different than home, even though we are still in the states, we have to go through agriculture before you can check your luggage. It was a very easy process once we figured out where to go and super easy dropping our luggage since we had Delta One seats. We were then off to the Delta Sky Lounge to relax until time for our flight. We had read that there were not a lot of options in the Sky Lounge in Honolulu so we opted to eat lunch before hand but could have easily had enough options there. Some light snacks, some last minute shaves ice, a blue Hawaiian and then it was time to head to our flight.
We had a very relaxing flight home, arriving at JFK before 9am. It didn't take long for our luggage. We made our way to the rental car area via the train, which is so easy! Really makes flying out of JFK very friendly! I make sure to have the access to bypass the lines for the rental companies whenever possible. So we skipped all the people heading to the counter, walked to our car, loaded our luggage and were soon on the road toward home to our fur babies. We listened to Hawaiian music on Pandora the entire ride home and for weeks afterwards to keep the memories alive.
We truly thought this would be a one and done trip. We fell in love with Hawaii, we fell in love with Aulani. We WILL be going back and have actually already booked our return trip. We will be cruising from Vancouver to Hawaii next September, so counting down our days!
I hope you have enjoyed our trip as much as I have enjoyed sharing it.
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