renting places to stay and cars in the Hawaiian islands

The first thing to know is you cannot just jump on a plane and expect to rent a room when you get here and rent a car when you get here unless you really want to pay through the nose or want to be camping with geckos and lizards in a storm culvert somewhere and since often it can rain 1 hour a day in many places on the islands (almost every day) this might not be a good idea.

So, the best idea usually is to rent wherever you want to stay as well as a rental care at least 2 months before you travel to Hawaii (UNLESS) you have friends there you are visiting and have their own car to drive you around in. Otherwise, it might not be a nice experience transportation or accommodation wise.

Though I have lived here before the friends I was traveling with: (One had been here before but mostly only stayed with friends and swam with the dolphins and stuff like that before.

However, since the last time I lived here on the Islands in 1990 I started coming on my honeymoon to my 3rd wife ever since. So, usually we have stayed around 10 to 14 days to as little as one week depending upon a variety of variables.

But, basically, we learned more each time. One of the first lessons we learned (when we could least afford it on our honeymoon) was that we were paying 11 dollars a day (20 years ago) to park our 4 wheel drive at the San Francisco Airport. then we were paying 16 to 20 dollars a day to park our rental car on Oahu at the Sheraton Waikiki which we thought was a needless expense both places.  Imagine in 1995 in December after getting married in Yosemite of having to pay that much if you aren't making tons of money at that moment. So, we thought that was a lot of money to pay two park two vehicles.

And recently I found trying to park even at San Jose Airport likely going to either Seattle or Portland I couldn't find any $15 dollar a day parking because it is miniscule and usually filled up. So, I had to park in the $30 dollar a day parking which I thought was insane.

So, the next time we flew from San Jose we hired our housekeeper to do it so at least we were paying someone we knew and not just wasting money ($30 a day for parking while traveling). Then when we flew back we hired her to pick us up which was still much less than if we paid for parking all that time.