Oahu, Hawaii: Must Do Activities

My husband and I took our honeymoon vacation in Oahu, Hawaii late December 06-early January 07. We had each been to Hawaii once before, separately with our families. We would definitely go back again. We booked a flight and hotel package for our honeymoon through Expedia and stayed at the Holiday Inn across the street from the Hilton Hawaiian Village. Hawaii is amazing but expensive. Take advantage of savings with your trip there any time that you can. We also booked our two tour bus excursions, the Polynesian Cultural Center and the Pearl Harbor Memorial, through Expedia when we got our flight/hotel reservations. We walked to everything else on Oahu except for the Dole Plantation, which is accessible via bus. We hope that your next trip there is as amazing as ours was!

My husband and I are both big fans of zoos and enjoy visiting them in any city that we can. This is one that is definitely worth visiting. It's pretty big and well laid out.

For what I hope are obvious reasons, I don't feel right promoting this as a tourism selling point on Oahu.  Suffice it to say that you will be glad that you took the time for this tour.

When you do the bus tour for the Polynesian Cultural Center, you're in for a whole day full of events.  There are lots of different shows and exhibits to keep you entertained.  We were pretty impressed by almost everything that we saw there.  It's also neat getting to see the other side of the island for the day.

Dole Whips are only available in Hawaii, at Disney World, and at Disney Land.  On Oahu, we found them at both the Ala Moana Center and the Dole Plantation (links for both below).  If anyone know of other Hawaii locations (on or off Oahu), please feel free to post them in the comments.  Dole Whips are one of the best desserts ever invented.  I'm sure that we ate at least five of them during our eight days there.

You don't have to stay at the Hilton Village to take advantage of their shopping, dining, and beaches.  We visited some aspect of the Hilton almost every day that we were there, including going to Benihana's for New Year's.  Nope, there isn't anything very special about this particular Benihana's, but it's fun to take time to do things like that when you're on vacation.

Of course you have to spend some time on the beach in Hawaii.  Even if you don't enjoy laying out on the beach all day (we don't either), it's still wonderful to walk along the water and enjoy the sights, sounds, and smells.

We couldn't believe how much high end shopping there is on Oahu.  To give you an example, there are about ten locations for purchasing Coach products in Honolulu.  We weren't in the market for lots of luxury items, but it's still a lot of fun to look around at everything that's there while you're picking up a few smaller souvenirs.

This is a neat FREE military museum right on the Waikiki Beach.  We walked through it at least twice while we were there.

Thirty years ago, this was a really neat location to visit because Dole did all of their canning right at the plantation site. Now all of the canning is shipped out. All that's left at the plantation site is a small amount of crops and some tourist activities. It's still neat to see pineapples growing. It's also a good destination for kids.

I don't have any pictures of us eating seafood or of any of the seafood that we ate there. So I have a picture of another gorgeous rainbow. But we had some very good seafood there, including Pad Thai with seafood, which my husband had at the Thai restaurant linked below. Like many things in Hawaii, the food is expensive because much of it is flown in from elsewhere. But seafood is a little cheaper and often very tasty.

All photographs in this hub are copyrighted by me, Rose Clearfield. Please contact me if you would like permission to use any of them. Thank you!