Rainy weather during your Hawaii vacation? Go local!

We’ve had a stretch of rainy weather in Hawaii of late. However, rainy weather is the best time to discover local Hawaii businesses when the idealized “day at the beach” is not in the forecast.

During the winter months in Hawaii, we often experience days or even weeks of sullen skies and dampened days. Those days don’t stop business as usual, unless unusually severe weather knocks out power or closes roads. (That happens in vacation destinations around the world, all the time.)

For visitors from almost anywhere, it never gets cold in Hawaii. It may get chilly, or snow on the 13,000-foot summit of Mauna Kea, but it certainly beats the frigid cold and snow and frost that Hawaii visitors are escaping during the winter months. Hawaii residents will still set up tents and campgrounds when the wind and rain are blowing sideways. If the waves are good, we’re out there to ride them.

But many of us will seek out restaurants, galleries, museums, and other indoor attractions to stay out of the rain and still get out of the house. There are such places on every island, and they are all worthy of the minor, minutes-away effort of getting to them.

Sustained, rainy and windy weather in Hawaii is not unusual during our winter months. It almost never lasts long. The sun is always bound to shine on our shores and verdant valleys. Rainbows abound. Sometimes, though, a stubborn weather front will wander through and cloak the Aloha State with cloud cover and not-so-perfect weather conditions.

It’s during those atypical times that local knowledge about the places to find out of the wind and rain make a Hawaii vacation especially unique. It’s part of the “real Hawaii” that many, if not all, Hawaii visitors are after. When the wind blows and the skies pour down, there is something special about a steaming cup of coffee grown and roasted on the Big Island, a fine, warm rum cocktail made with homegrown sugarcane, or a thick burger made from free-range beef raised in the whispering grasses of quiet rural Hawaiian pastures.

Unless you are a professional golfer in a gale during a worldwide broadcast (which has just happened), or an Instagram icon fishing for clicks, rainy winter weather in Hawaii is as much a part of the Aloha State experience as a Mai Tai on the beach on a fiery and cloudless sunset evening.

In fact, most of us who live here know that it’s always just “passing, brah”. Instead of making for the beach, we’ll head for the nearest sushi joint, noodle house, or neighborhood watering hole. Art museums and galleries welcome throngs of visitors and residents alike, all seeking the real Hawaii without getting drenched. Unless, of course, the point is to get in the water, where you’re wet anyway.

We here at Hawaii Aloha Travel can make your Hawaii vacation your best-ever travel choice, rain or shine.

Posted by: Jamie Winpenny on Jan 27, 2020