My Amazing Hawaii Adventure! {with Young Living}

Happy Friday, y’all! I promise I haven’t dropped off the face of the earth. It’s been almost two weeks since I’ve blogged. Ack! I had the most marvelous time in the world while I was in Hawaii and I’ve been recovering from the trip {jet-lag, digging through inboxes and loving on my boys} ever since!

I’m SO excited to share my trip in photos with you today. It’s a photo heavy post, so buckle up and have fun coming along with me to the Big Island. 🙂

I flew to Dallas, TX on Tuesday and met up with my dear friend Alyssa. We met through blogging about 5 years ago and now we are Young Living addicts together. I asked Alyssa if she would be my guest on the Hawaii trip and she readily agreed.

I’m not the most brave air-traveller, but after six flights, I think I’m a lot more brave now. 🙂

We arrived in Kona {the airport is all open-air and we had to walk down steps onto the tarmac} on Wednesday around noon Hawaii time. We stayed at the Hilton Waikoloa Village resort. Oh my WORD. It is beautiful!

This was the view from our room. Stunning!

Another view from the balcony.

We did some walking around to see what we could find…including Hawaiian BBQ for lunch and some gallons of water from the market.

The week kicked off with an ocean side party…

…where the NingXia Red flowed freely. I was in my element. HA! NingXia Red is a powerful, antioxidant beverage that tastes delicious. I highly recommend it for everyone!

Young Living has strict dietary guidelines for their events, so the food was all very healthy. I appreciate that so much!

We slept like babies until squawking birds woke us up at 6 AM. Just a smidge early for being on vacation. But oh my! Look how beautiful the resort was. This was our view from breakfast!

We all received a beautiful lei AND brand new Maui Jim sunglasses. Young Living spoiled us to death!

Then we attended a motivational talk by the Oola Guys. Oola is short for oo-la-la…that wonderful feeling you have when every area of life is balanced and growing. The 7 F’s of Oola are Faith, Family, Friends, Fitness, Finance, Field and Fun. I’ve decided that I need more fun in my life! 🙂

That afternoon we went to the beach. It was beautiful. The sun was nice…and I was thankful for my beach umbrella so I didn’t get fried.

Wednesday night a bunch of us went out for dinner, but on our way out, we ran into Gary and Josef Young who just arrived from the Winter Harvest in Idaho. Gary said it was hard to leave the brand new distillery. I love his heart and motivation to continually research and develop essential oils and the distillation process.

After breakfast on Thursday morning, I met fellow-blogger Jessica Gianelloni. I’ve admired Jessica’s precious family and her very researched posts over the past several years. It was a treat to get to know her better on this trip! Then we were off to the sandalwood farm…

It was a privilege for us to have Gary ride on our bus on the way to the farm. He talked the entire time about all the work he is doing to develop protocols for various things. It was a really amazing time to hear Gary’s heart and passion.

We observed the Hawaiian Sandalwood distillery. The farm is part of a reforestation project and will be sustainable for many, many years to come.

The sandalwood in the above photo has already been distilled. They have other uses for it, but I’m not remembering them now…

It got a little chilly at the higher altitude, but we were SO happy to be experiencing everything!

Gary is the most kind-hearted, tender man who wants nothing more than to see essential oils in every home in the world. That’s what drives him every day. He wears his heart on his sleeve {in a good way} and I admire that a lot.

I believe that this is the boiler (above).

And this is where the wood chips are distilled. The top of the funnel is a small glass cylinder which is the separator where the floral water (hydrosol) separates from the essential oil. Pretty cool!

There was a little hula action that went on. It is quite the art.

One group picked seeds, one group planted trees and the other group got to wrap special tubes around baby trees to protect them and keep them hydrated. It was so fun!

We got our own bottle of Royal Hawaiian Sandalwood…it’s not available for purchase and it will be a while until that takes place. The burlap bag has un-distilled sandalwood chips in it.

The sunset was SO beautiful that night.

We had the choice of snorkeling, horse back riding or ziplining on Saturday. I chose ziplining because it kind of terrified me. I knew that I had a lot of fears to conquer on this trip, so it was a perfect choice. And just FYI, BIEA Zip Lining is incredible and extremely safe.

Alyssa, on the other hand, wasn’t happy with me at first because she’s really afraid of heights. But, the whole entire experience was INCREDIBLE! And we learned a lot about ourselves…and a lot about faith.

We had the best group and the best guides to take us through the course. There were 8 ziplines and a rope bridge.

Pre-zipping. Ha!

Here we are about halfway through. Bill (white t-shirt) was our shuttle driver. He had never been ziplining before and we had so much fun with him. He was such a nice man.

Organic passion fruit, anyone? 🙂

Some of you may recognize my friend Susan from The Confident Mom. She and I do monthly online educational classes for using essential oils. We were blog friends, then business friends and now we can say that we are in-real-life friends! 🙂

Alyssa was “Auntie” and I was “Zippy.” How funny!

This was the next to the last zip line. We had to back up and run and keep running off the platform. It was scary, but SO empowering. It really reminded me of what faith really is….it’s that running, jumping, trusting that something’s going to hold you up kind of thing. Powerful.

We stopped for local ice cream on the way back to the resort. It was SO GOOD!

On Saturday night, there was a farewell luau that was a lot of fun. I am so grateful to have had the experience of seeing Young Living’s Seed to Seal process first-hand, meeting Gary and Mary and the boys, many on the executive team and so many incredible distributors. What a fun group! P.S. I was wearing heels in the above photo. 😉

We arrived back on the mainland bright and early Monday morning after the worst flight ever. The pilots kept apologizing for the turbulence….that’s how you know it was really bad. There was no smooth air anywhere! I finally made it home on Monday afternoon and it was so good to hug my boys. They greeted me with roses and lots of love.

Anyway, that’s a re-cap of my Hawaii Adventure. It was an incredible experience!

There’s so much that we didn’t get to do…but there’s always next time!

xoxo

Myra