Our family vacation, this year, was to Hong Kong. We spent 8 days, two weeks ago, taking our time to visit the things that tourists visit. The two kids came along. This is the second overseas vacation for Ian. We didn’t bring him on our trip to Japan last year, because we thought it would be too difficult to manage him then. They’re one year older now, and so, okay, we’ll try this year. Overall it was a really fun…
When I first told Vanessa that we were bringing her to Japan for a holiday, the mind in her had many questions. The first one that popped out (quite instantly, I must add), was, “Japan got playground?” Quite obviously, playground is the highest priority in her list of many logistic concerns. I thought it will be a good idea to note down some of the funny things she has said or asked about concerning this trip.
We’ve become somewhat frequent visitors to Japan. Not so frequent like every week, or every month, or even every year (although there was one year we visited twice), but certainly frequent enough that we don’t have to do as much research like we used to have to do. We’ve got some standard itinerary, standard hotels, travel routes, etc. It’s not so much that we always want to do the same thing, but they serve as useful fallback plans when we…
It’s finally raining now in the afternoon of the second day of this Lunar New Year. I think this must be about one of the hottest ever Lunar New Year. It’s been so hot I already feel uncomfortable the moment I step out of the house to go anywhere. So thank goodness it is raining now. Oops. It seems it has stopped. But well, hopefully that brief shower cools down the ground a little, otherwise it feels as if the…
After twelve days in Honolulu, it’s time for us to return home. Our flight is at 8am in the morning, which means we’ve to get to the airport pretty early that morning, and that means getting up and starting the day even earlier to get to the airport on time. Traveling with kids means everything takes a lot more than time than adults alone would have taken. What more, with the “enhanced security” measures being introduced after the NW253 bomb…
Today’s the last full day we have in Honolulu, because we leave for our flight back to Singapore early tomorrow morning. We decided to all have lunch together at a nearby Chinese restaurant called Happy Days. Easy to find, thanks to GPS navigation again. We had dim sum and ordered a few other dishes. I found myself liking the chilli particularly. Then I realized that I haven’t had any chilli since stepping foot in the US. I don’t know if…
Our previous drive eastward on the Kalanianaole Highway brought us past Hanauma Bay, but it was closed (every Tuesday). Today, we made a trip just to see this place. Unfortunately, the car park was full, and we weren’t let in. In the end, we stopped at another nearby sightseeing point, and walked to Hanauma Bay. The place is awfully crowded. You have to pay to get to the beach. There is a public bus route whose main purpose is to…
We did a few things today: Visit to Diamond Head Crater, the Waikiki Aquarium, and then shopping at the Waikele Premium Outlets. We didn’t actually plan to go up Diamond Head Crater initially, but since we were going to be driving past it, we thought why not just stop for a few moments. It does cost $5 per car to go in, according to a sign post at the bottom on the trail doing up. It turned out that the…
We went to the northern part of Oahu today. When you have a rented car, you try to make full use of it. It was the Dole Plantation that we originally wanted to visit, but when we realized it was pretty close to the North Shore, we thought we’ll just go up there to visit as well. There wasn’t time for us the explore the entire North Shore. We just wanted to hit Haleiwa, have lunch, then turn back to…
Day eight in Hawaii is Christmas Day. We went for a drive around the island of Oahu. It was only half the island, actually. In fact, it was even less than half the island. We planned to drive eastward, head toward Kailua beach, then turn west to Pali Lookout, then back into Honolulu and return home. This is supposed to be a scenic drive to take in the sights of the sea, the beaches, and the highlands. It’s the first…
