House of Emery: 5 Wonderful Years!

Five Years have gone by so fast! This seems like just yesterday!

Matt and I celebrated our 5 year anniversary last week in beautiful Honolulu, Hawaii. The trip was incredible. It was my first time to the Aloha State and it will definitely not be the last. We stayed at the Kahala Resort on the other side of Diamond Head away from Waikiki. We were fortunate enough to be bumped up to First Class on Alaskan Airlines for both of our flights and let me just say...wow! First class is UH-MAZING! We got signature drinks when we took our seat and had a three course meal on both flights. Matt just said, "Don't get used to this." and I just nodded knowing full well how right he was so I took full advantage of the endless free drinks and warm towels provided!

We rented a car once we landed and wouldn't ya know we got a Jeep Wrangler! What a perfect car for Hawaii and it brought back some great memories of my old Wrangler!

So we arrived at the secluded and oh so wonderful Kahala Resort and checked in with no issue. But when getting to our room we found other keys and luggage receipts for someone plus a hat that definitely didn’t belong. So we called down to the front desk to have them remove it. We left the resort and wanted to check out Waikiki for dinner and wow, what a cluster! It was SOOOO touristy. I am super glad we didn’t stay down there. I would have gone mad. So once we arrived back at our resort there was a message on our phone and it turns out that because of the ‘inconvenience’ we experienced with our room (I guess referring to the other person’s stuff in our room) we have been upgraded to an Ocean Front room! Say what?! So we immediately started packing and headed to our new room which was so unbelievable that the view literally took my breath away! So below are the two views; one from our first room and then other from our new room. Just a slight difference, right?

Our Original View at Kahala

Our Upgraded View!!!

Did I mention our hotel had a dolphin lagoon? I LOVED watching the dolphins from our hotel room lanai and walking by them playing on the way to the beach. :)

Another view from our Lanai!

I forgot to mention that before heading out to Waikiki we had a drink at the veranda at our resort to start. When we were sitting there a women with two kids came up to the table next to us and were all chummy. I was listening to the women and I definitely recognized her. I couldn’t place her but I knew she was famous. Then…it hit me. Mariska Hargitay from Law and Order: SVU! I immediately looked her up on IMDB and I was right. I snapped a quick pic of her while we were heading out for Waikiki but it wasn’t the best with the iphone.

For our first whole day in Hawaii we relaxed beach side and it was amazing.

View to the Left of where we sat

View to the Right of where we sat

For our second day we went for some adventures. We first went to Hanauma Bay to do some snorkeling. What a wonderful place! I have never been snorkeling before but what a great place to experience it for the first time!

Then headed to get lunch at a place we heard about on Guy Fieri’s show Diner’s, Drive-ins, and Dives just a few days before leaving for Hawaii. The place is called Fresh Catch and it was so good! The freshest poke you could ask for!!!

From there we headed to the North Shore to check out Waimea Valley Audubon Center and the Waimea Falls which was seen in the show Lost.

After that, we stopped by a portion of the North Shore known for their sea turtles and actually got to see quite a few of them trying to come ashore.

These turtles were literally 2 feet from me!

For our actual anniversary on September 1^st we had dinner at the Resorts premier restaurant, Hoku. We got the whole fish entrée to share and it was awesome. After dinner we strolled down the beach where there was an event taking place at our hotel. Turns out Mariska Hargitay was throwing a charity event for her foundation called Joyful Heart. When we got back to our room we could hear the event going on and actually Third Eye Blind was playing so from our lanai we got to hear them play their known hits. What a great way to celebrate 5 years!

We had a wonderful time and it was definitely one of the best vacations I have ever had. We missed our Riley Bear though but she was in great hands with my mom and Aunt Karen. They had so much fun.