Well our trip started out a little rough. We had a 2pm flight scheduled for Sunday. We’ve worked a good system for cheap parking by the airport: Brian drops the girls and I off with all the bags at arrivals and then he drives to the nearest city (about 7 min. away) to park on street for free. He then gets a taxi to the airport for around $13. Parking at Sydney airport is ridiculously expensive! This has ALWAYS worked for us, until this day. The girls and I were just hanging out killing time while we were waiting for Brian who was struggling to find a taxi. I finally went up to ask when the check in cut off time was for our 2pm flight and she said 10 minutes, they close at 1pm. Brian was trying to hail a taxi for 20 minutes and wasn’t going to make it. Had we had an extra 5 min., we could have made it. Thankfully she switched our flight to later that night for free (it would’ve been $700+ otherwise). Unfortunately the flight didn’t leave until 10:30pm. So, we went back home and waited. We made sure to be extra early this time and Brian had about 5 taxis to choose from.
Here we are awaiting our flight.
It was a late night! The big girls did great going right to sleep but Hallie likes to fight it too much. We arrived in Fiji and made it to our hotel just after 4am. We all got a solid 4 hours here before starting our day off.
We enjoyed our breakfast and walking around our first resort before getting a taxi into the city.
Our plans changed a bit when our flight changed, so we just did one activity on the main island before catching our boat to Malolo Island for the rest of our stay. Here we are at Sri Siva Subramaniya Temple in Nadi. It is the largest Hindu temple in the Southern hemisphere. We learned a bit about the history and those that come there to worship. The architecture and paintings were beautiful. We had to wear sarongs to cover our legs and shoulders before going in.
Some of the offerings
From here, we got a few grocery items for lunch and snacks and went back to our hotel to pack up. A bus came to pick us up to take us to Denarau Marina to meet up with our friends from the States and catch our boat to our resort.
It was SO great to see our friends from Michigan and Hawaii that we hadn’t seen in 15 months and 2 years respectively. We got a chance to catch up a bit on the hour boat ride. Here’s our first look of Malolo Island as we approach Plantation Island Resort.
It was so nice to hear them playing and singing island music and welcoming us with leis.
They gave us an introduction to the resort and once we were through with registration, they took us to our rooms, which were very nice and close to our friends.
We would spend a lot of time out here throughout the week, eating, playing, sun blocking, chatting and card playing at night, etc.
The first thing all the kids wanted to do was go to one of the pools, so that’s just what we did. They had a blast on the waterslides and splashing around!
After getting cleaned up, we made our way to our first buffet dinner. Lots of great food and too much eating!
Everyone was a bit tired and jet lagged (even us even though we only had a 4 hour flight…the late night killed us!) and Hallie didn’t even last long enough for us to bring her plate back from the buffet! After dinner we called it a night.
Thankfully our room was right next to the Perry’s, so we left our adjoining door open so they could here our kids and Brian and I tried to walk off some of that buffet! It was nice to familiarize ourselves with the resort and stop in to see some fun frog racing from the kid’s club.
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