North Island

I started my day with a run. Figured that I wouldn't be feeling too keen later when the heat is on. I'm not used to early morning fitness though. So although I covered 5-6 kms, I probably only ran about 1/2 that distance. I ran from our condo to the beach and as far as I could along the beach. And ran a similar route back. We all cooked eggs for breakfast in our little kitchen, and put together sandwiches, veggies and fruit for lunch on the beach later.

I used WIFI to map our route to the Dole Pineapple plantation and we headed to the car. About an hour later we arrived. I did not expect it to be as busy with tourists as it was. It reminded us of the Hershey Chocolate factory we had visited on a previous trip. Several tour packages were available but we opted to just take the the 20 min. tour train. The wait was going to be about 20 mins so we decided to have a snack. Emma and I had Dole whips. They are basically soft ice cream flavoured with pineapple. Very yummy. Laura and the boys had pineapple fruit cups.

The tour was informative and enjoyable. We saw a number of different crops along with the pineapples, including bananas, cacao, avocado, coconut and others. Everyone (except for me because I had seen pineapple plantations before) was surprised to see that pineapples don't grow on trees!

A short drive North of the Dole stop and we had reached the North shore of the island. We stopped at one of the first beaches we found, Haleiwa Alii, and had our lunch. It wasn't the best for swimming so we drove along the coast and stopped to swim at Sunset Beach. After a nice break there we drove further along the North Coast before heading back south along the East coast of the island. I had hoped to take highway 61 back into Honolulu but it was closed due to a landslide some time ago. As a result, the traffic was quite slow moving and it took us quite a bit longer to get back to our condo than anticipated. It was a very scenic drive and well worth it though.Read more