Holiday to Hawaii in Nov 2026: Day 3 – Afternoon in Lihue

After deboarding the aircraft at Lihue airport, we could feel the ambient warmth, which was lovely. This was one of the reasons that we had travelled so far.

I left Vick holding the cases at arrivals and I walked over to the Avis Rental Office. It was one of those ridiculous situations, where the airport wanted passengers to catch a shuttle bus to drive around a loop and stop off at an office about a stone’s throw away from where you first got on that bus.

So I decided to avoid the merry-go-round. It took me a few mins to walk across the street to the Avis office.

It was not busy, but it still took about 5 mins to check in with the Avis Preferred team, so that they could show me my Jeep parked directly outside of the office.

I asked why I had been provided with a Jeep when I had ordered a Camaro Convertible. Apparently the Camaros and Mustangs had been recalled.

I later checked and ChatGPT reckoned that Camaros hadn’t been manufactured sine 2024 and Ford Mustangs had been subject to a recall due an electrical issue. So the reason provided was credible.

Why didn’t they pre-warn me about such a change if they knew I was going to be impacted?

I was provided with a 4WD Jeep Wrangler, with removable roof panels. So, technically, I guess they could argue it was some sort of convertible.

I didn’t complain at that point. I would end up dropping a line to BA Holidays, but my first objective was to drive around the loop to Arrivals to pick up the missus and get her to where she wanted to go.

That first stop was a Starbucks! There was a store just off Kaumualii Highway, about 10 mins away, so that’s where we headed.

It was a classic location for a Starbucks: on a small out-of-town type shopping area.

We took the opportunity of getting some lunch and then we started thinking about shopping for food.

We fancied an evening in listening to the waves, eating cheese and drinking some wine.

So, next stop was Walmart, which was pretty disappointing on the food front.

There was no deli and everything was so expensive! A simple loaf of bread was $7.50 (about £6) – crazy!

We pressed on to Poipu to find our apartment.

The beach-front apartment was called Poipu Shores and we had an ocean-front top-floor apartment waiting for us.

The apartment was everything we wanted, albeit the furniture was a little dated. The balcony had an unobstructed view of the ocean, which was about 10 feet away, so the noise of the sea was almost deafening.

Due to the disappointment in Walmart, we looked for a local supermarket and there was a promising store at Poipu Beach called Living Foods.

Vick also had a desire to go and watch the sea turtles come out onto the beach for the evening, so we combined the two jobs. After a visit to Living Foods we stopped off at Poipu Beach on the way back.

There must have been 15 sea turtles that had already beached themselves. One was still moving a little, having not quite gotten far enough out of the sea for it’s own liking, but we had missed most of the action.

We decided we would need to come back the following day a little earlier.

Back to the apartment and we shared a Caesar salad, some cheese and wine, before turning in, fairly early.