My Top 10 Apps for an Amazing Hawaiian Vacation

Back when I lived on Oahu (yes, it already pains me to say "lived" in the past tense :( ), there were a few apps that never left my side either when I was coming up with ideas for an afternoon or night out on Oahu or when I was planning a vacation to one of our neighbor islands.  Many were indispensable to how I planned or got new ideas, and I figured that many of you readers would probably love to know about them and my thought process for planning.  

Some of the apps are already pretty popular and some of them aren't so well-known.  I have all of these apps on my iPad, but they're also all available for the Android platform as well and I've included both the iTunes and Google Play links for them all.  So without further ado, let's get started!

One quick note -- this is in no way a sponsored post.  All the opinions expressed are 100% mine and no app, company, or person has swayed my thoughts in any way, other than by being independently awesome, of course.  And no, this isn't an April Fool's post either!  ;)

LoveSac: A Review

Back before Mr. L and I moved to Hawaii, I took a little trip up to Maryland to visit him while he was doing some training.  We were able to play the tourist and see lots of different things around the area and I was so thrilled we were able to share in that experience.  (I just remembered that I never even recapped that trip -- eek!  Maybe I should!)  One weekend while I was there, we headed off to one of the malls close to him and wandered around for a while.

At some point in our trip, we came across a small-ish furniture store tucked in around the other stores in the mall and decided to walk in and check it out.  The store's name was LoveSac, and we quickly saw what was so awesome about the "Sactionals" style furniture -- you can rearrange them into countless different formations!

Blurb.com Photo Book Review

As you may remember, I chose to order a honeymoon photo book through the website Blurb.com a couple of weeks ago.  We finally got it in, and it's time to review it!

Yay, it's here!

Honeymoon Photo Book

I'm super excited about a new project I'm halfway finished with -- a honeymoon photo book!

I contemplated just going the traditional route with our honeymoon photos by printing them from Snapfish and putting them in a normal photo album, but I wanted to learn more about the other options that are out there.  Since I've made two photo books before (of our wedding pictures for our parents' Christmas presents) with the help of Shutterfly.com, I was definitely interested in pursuing that route again.  But with a project this extensive (TONS more pictures than the fifty or so chosen for our parents' albums) I knew it would take a little more personalization than Shutterfly had to offer.

Front cover of the wedding album we made for my parents

I've been avidly browsing Weddingbee.com for about a year now, and a few posts written by the bloggers have been dedicated to wedding albums, or photo books.  Someone mentioned Blurb.com, and although it took me a bit to finally check it out, I'm pretty happy that I did.

Blurb offers so much more customization plus the ability to tackle large projects with many pictures.  I downloaded their free software, BookSmart, and I was well on my way to designing my album!

I broke our pictures into two halves since there are roughly 600 pictures in total.  The first part will include the beginning of our trip all the way to our first excursion from Monte Carlo, and the second part will pick up after Monte Carlo and end with the end of the honeymoon.  I'm currently constructing the second part, but the first part has been polished up and just recently ordered!

Here's the cover of the first book:

I'm pretty excited about actually getting the book in my hands and seeing how it looks.  The best part was that the total for one book was only about $34 (with a free shipping code), so if it's terrible, I won't feel as upset as if I'd ordered an $80-100 book.  It isn't scheduled to ship until the first of February, but you can bet as soon as I get it in my hands, I'll be ready to (in true blogger fashion) take some detail pictures of it and review my experience with Blurb!

Going through this process also made me realize that I've never properly recapped our honeymoon.  With our one year anniversary getting closer and closer, I think it will definitely be appropriate to tackle honeymoon recaps in the near future.  It'll be a neat way to bring back some fond memories of one really awesome trip, so expect those soon!

Post-Wedding Review

I loved my wedding day.

It was an incredible experience to be surrounded by such love, not only from Mr. L, but from our entire families and our friends, and I will always hold wonderful memories from this special day.  Everyone (seemed) to have a good time, and to me, that's what mattered the most, aside from the whole marrying my best friend thing :)  It did not go exactly "as planned" or "just as scheduled", as of course is the norm in the wedding world, but in my eyes, it was beautifully perfect.