To end his speech at our reception, my brother told us where we were going to be going on our honeymoon. “Enjoy your honeymoon in Hawaii,” he said.
I had never been to Hawaii before, and Mr. Sugar Cube had only been once to Maui 15 years ago. This time we were going to the Big Island, to spend six days in Kona and enjoy the coffee festival before spending five days in Waikoloa with our toes in the sand.
We didn’t have a rental car, so we were shuttled to our hotel when we landed. And not having a car made for a great first week on the big island. We walked everywhere. Everywhere.
OK. Not everywhere. We rented an electric-assist tandem to go to Original Hawaiian Chocolate since that was too far to walk.

There were a few sunrises and a lot of coffee.
A lot of reeeeally good coffee.
When we weren’t drinking coffee, snorkeling, or exploring, we decided to partake in the lantern festival, where we got to make our own paper lantern, walk in a parade, and shoo our lantern into the bay. Unfortunately, the wind was not in our favor and most toppled over or came back to land capsized. We walked away before anything happened to ours so that I could pretend it made it out to the ocean, where it’s still on its way to Australia.

Before leaving Kona for Waikoloa, we took a tour of the island, where we played on lava fields, walked through lava tubes, witnessed a rainbow at Rainbow Falls (according to our tour guide there hadn’t been one there for ...