Getting ready to fly

It was a super busy day at work. I was planning to finish my work early today and do some early packing and take some good rest before the long flight. It is indeed a 6 hour flight from Seattle to Maui. Luckily we took the direct flight from Seattle.

All packing complete and we are planning to take some of Indian Groceries for cooking. We booked the resort that had a full kitchen in place. It’s always nice to have some home made food atleast one course a day 🙂

We got to the airport on time and boarded the flight successfully. It was really very difficult to occupy the kids for 6 hour duration. We had two 8 yr old kids and they were really busy with the Windows Phone playing Angry Birds & other games.

We landed Maui on time and reached our Hotel around 6 PM

The sunset was very early and it was pretty dark around 6 PM. We could not see any views nor beaches on our way to the hotel.

We stayed at the Outrigger Aina Nalu Resort that was located in Lahaina close to Front Street. It’s a 5 min walk to the front street that is filled up with lot of shops more like a downtown. The resort was pretty good with beautiful plantation and they had 2 pools inside. Overall we felt very comfortable with the 2 bedroom unit that we booked that had all amenities needed for the stay.

Booking Recommendations/Cost
Some of them have asked me for the overall cost of Hawaii Trip. Hawaii is normally expensive when compared to other places and it depends on the travel season as well. We planned during the Christmas break for our kids and this is a peak season. It’s very famous to travel during Christmas time to Hawaii but it was very expensive and can go upto ~7000 $ – 8000 $ for a family of 3.

After all of the research in multiple sites, we decided to travel a week before Christmas and got a pretty decent deal

Expedia has good vacation packages that includes Flight, Hotel and Car. Costco Travel is also another good place to shop around for vacation packages but I found Expedia to cheaper by 500$ for this trip.

Our overall cost per family for 6 nights & 7 days – $2300 (includes flight, hotel & car)
Other activities that you might need to spend :-
•Maui Pass – $126
•Snorkel – ~100$ per person (timeshare saved us to 20$ per head)
•Helicopter tour – ~150 $
•Food Cost – pretty expensive as it’s a tourist spot. Since we cooked our food, we didn’t go out to restaurant much.
•Water gears rental – ~50$ (depends on what u rent)