One week ago today, my wife and I returned home after a 16-day trip of a lifetime to Hawaii. For the sake of simplicity on my part, and for ease of you the reader, I have broken this into three separate blog posts – one for each segment of our trip. First, an overview.

We had been anticipating this trip for nearly a year. While we had long dreamt of traveling to Hawaii, it was about a year ago that the dreams began to form into a reality. Isabelle had embarked on a journey with a new mentor and coach, Anne Bérubé. Based in Nova Scotia, Canada, Anne has been holding retreats in Hawaii for a few years now. We had actually looked into going on said retreat a few years prior, but we couldn’t justify the expense at the time. My how the times have changed.

Largely due to COVID-19, we have had a major shift in our priorities. No more would we stand back and hesitate when opportunities presented themselves to us; who knows if we end up with some other global pandemic or other event that prevents us from doing anything for the better part of two years. As avid readers of my blog will know, Isabelle and I had been planning our 10th anniversary trip for about 7 years, putting away money monthly to allow us to have an extravagant, fun-filled trip to Walt Disney World for October 1, 2021. This would be the convergence of our 10th wedding anniversary as well as the 50th anniversary of Walt Disney World. But thanks to the aforementioned pandemic, our plans were canceled. Unable to travel, we decided to repurpose our savings from Disney 2021 to Hawaii 2026. We would finally take our long talked of trip for our 15th anniversary.

Cut to Isabelle’s program with Anne Bérubé in 2023. She was again holding a Lemurian Huna retreat in Hawaii in 2024. We had money this time. We had motivation. So we booked two spots on the retreat and started planning for our big adventure.

Since we were going all the way to Hawaii, we thought we would take the opportunity to extend our trip beyond the retreat. We decided that we would stick to two islands for this visit. Anne’s retreat would be on Kaua’i, so that was island #1. We opted to choose O’ahu for our second island so that we could visit Honolulu and Disney’s Aulani resort. But more on those in the second and third parts of this series of posts.

Continue reading “Hawaiian Adventures Part 1: Lemurian Huna” →