It’s no secret that Hawaii has been on my pre-baby bucket list for some time. I really wanted to go to Hawaii for our honeymoon, but after doing some research, it seemed like a lot of the pretty tropical places I wanted to go to would be smack dab in the middle of hurricane season if we went after our late August wedding.

Costa Rica, the place we ended up going on our honeymoon, still turned out to be an amazing honeymoon choice and quite a fun adventure to start our marriage with, but afterwards, I still craved a relaxing, clear-blue-beach type of vacay… so I made an itsy bitsy demand from hubby that we had to go to Hawaii before we decided to “settle down” and start a family.

On Playa Montezuma in Costa Rica on a rainy day.

My sudden, out-of-the-blue plans to finish graduate school in 2015 ended up stalling our idea of going to Hawaii, so when I finally graduated in December, we were more than ready for this relaxing vacation! Hubby was more anxious than me and was ready to take off in January or February.

It seemed silly for me to admit, but I was actually hesitant on leaving this soon because #1 – I was definitely not bikini-ready after all the 500-calorie lattes I drank during the last few months of grad school and needed a few months to get back in shape! And #2 – we hadn’t done any research or planning and had no idea which island we should go to or what time of year was best to go or if we had to book lodging or some activities way in advance.

Hubby was NOT accepting my lame excuses though! He thought I was putting off Hawaii so I could put off having a baby. Ha! So not true. Okay. Maybe a little true. But still. We really hadn’t done any research! So we scrambled, bought books, and did some quick research.

When was a good time a year to go to Hawaii? Well, everyone seemed to swear any time of year was perfect to go to Hawaii because the temperature was great year-round.

What island would we go to? Kauai! It seemed like the most laid back island, with the fewest crowds and buildings. We read that Kauai’s north shore was the prettiest and greenest part of the island, but it came at a price. It rained the most on the north shore. This was totally fine with us! We assumed it would be passing rain storms and perfect weather most of the day. We looked forward to staying on the side of the island that might not have much access to restaurants, nightlife, and shops, but would be a quiet retreat and fun adventure like Costa Rica!

Almost all of my initial, brief research of Kauai led me to the same drop-dead-gorgeous section of the island, the Na Pali Coast. I withheld from looking at too many photos of Kauai because I didn’t want to ruin the surprise of how beautiful it would be in person, but one photo stuck in my head of some amazing caves along the coast that could be sea kayaked to.

So in two days time, we decided we would go to Hawaii in February and we would be staying on the island of Kauai for 11 days! We felt very spoiled that we only had to wait one month for our vacay to come! I simply could NOT wait to see the Na Pali Coast in person, relax on the beach with pina coladas, and snorkel in clear blue waters with turtles and colorful fish.

Up next: we we say Hello to HI!