In March I had the opportunity to travel to Hawaii for a wedding photographer conference in Honolulu. I have never been to Hawaii but it was on my destination bucket list. For me budget is important so I connected online with a few photographers attending the conference to share a hotel room with me and crossed my fingers we would all get along. Thankfully for me my roomies were so awesome! As soon as I arrived my one roommate, Alyssa, asked if I wanted to rent a car for 24 hours and we could go see more of the island to which I obviously replied “heck yes!”.

So we GPS walked it to find the Budget car rental across the street from the Hilton then my fear set in…. would I the driver be able to see over the steering wheel in this rental car!!?? For real my biggest fear because I once rented a vehicle in San Diego and I had to use my pillow from the hotel to roll up and sit on to see and at this point lets be honest I wasn’t carrying my pillow through Hawaii just in case! We get in our little car and thankfully it adjusted enough for me! So off we set on an adventure with this shinny silver car for 24 hours.

We had zero plans/itinerary all we knew was we wanted to see the island as much as we could. We started driving on Pali Highway and saw a gorgeous interesting spot but didn’t have enough time to stop so we kept going until we saw a pullout spot which turned out to be Nu‘uanu Pali Lookout. You have to pay for parking here but thankfully it was busy with other tourists stopping and just recycling their parking pass to a new arrival. The views were gorgeous so we took some photos and carried on… the original place we missed turns out it was Manoa Falls which only means we need to go back one day!

Next stop was Kualoa Ranch. We didn’t have reservations but assumed we could just drive through ourselves, not the case. So we contemplated booking a tour but they just finished for the day so we opted to come back in the morning so we could to the movie scene tour. As we were leaving we saw a gorgeous rainbow and thought lets just chase rainbows for a while. So we headed up along Kaneohe Bay and literally just drove then turned around chasing the rainbows now this was Hawaii right!? We stopped along random beach spots on the side of the road and just took it all in wishing we had brought along our snorkel gear….oops forgot that!

Next we decided to venture back towards Waikiki and see what else we could find. We decided to take a different route back because why travel the same road twice? We took the H3 which is the most gorgeous freeway I have ever seen (photo below). We were afraid to pullover to get any photos even though there was no traffic around! This freeway goes through the Tetsuo Harano tunnels through the Koolau Range seriously stunning views! We were told that if it was raining enough we would see dozens of waterfalls along this route but unfortunately it wasn’t raining hard enough as we drove through!

Photo credit used with permission and edited: Flickr/ChrisG

Next up was photographing the milky way at night out at Lanai Lookout out on the lava rock! I didn’t bring a tripod so I used a rolled up towel. It turned out to be cloudy but we still shot away anyways. We left as the rain started so that we could get a solid 3 hours sleep before heading out for the 4am hike!