Hawaii - Grand Wailea

The Grand Wailea is indeed a very fun hotel to stay at.  Not the part about 5 of us living in one room together but the part about the awesome waterslides, baby beach and gazillion pools. But we'll get to that.  The resort grounds were beautiful.  Henry couldn't understand why he couldn't swim in the ponds in the main foyer.  Why would you have pools just for decoration? Good point.  The only drawback to such a large complex is that our room was a very LONG walk to the pools.

The whole reason we decided to stay at the Grand Wailea for 2 nights and 1 day was to spend that day swimming and using the water slides.

We hired a cabana near the baby beach and pool.  It was so fun there for the kids being able to play with the sand, walk into the shallow pool and splash around before swimming out.  All three kids got floating rings and we went around and around in the lazy river.  We also had icecream smoothies in pineapple cups delivered to the cabana.

During the little kid naps Lucy and Andrew went on all the waterslides as well as the water elevator. Lucy went non-stop from 10am till 6pm at which time she just wanted to go to bed and sleep without eating dinner. But she says it was the BEST day in Hawaii.

We ate incredibly well.  The first night we ate at Amasia, an Alan Wong restaurant. I  could spend a couple of hours raving about how good the food is (and we were only eating off the gluten free menu). We had an amazing experience there.  And at the end the manager told us that we had the best behaved children.  I overheard her telling someone else how good the kids were too.  I'll take it as there are plenty of the opposite occasions when I just want to slink out of a restaurant. Our table was across a bridge and on top of a platform built over the koi pond that flowed through the restaurant.  The kids had a great time spotting the fish swimming by.  I had a good time eating lomilomi sushi and drinking lilikoi cocktails.  Andrew had another waygu beef steak (though not as good or as expensive as Tokonoma in Sydney!) Check out the tomato salad below.  So good we got two!

The next day we had breakfast in the Grand Dining Room complete with gluten free pancakes (something we hadn't enjoyed for a month), for lunch we enjoyed takeout pizza in our cabana by the pool and dinner was on site at Bistro Molokini.