INFO ABOUT LANAI

Lanai Facts

Lanai is a lesser known island so here is some info that you probably won't read/enjoy learning about:

1- Lanai City (pretty much the only city on the island) is almost 1,700 feet above sea level (just to give you an idea of how high this is...Honolulu is 18 feet above sea level, Logan Utah is 4,535 feet above sea level and San Diego is 42 feet above sea level...isn't the Internet great).  Nights get a little chilly.

2-  There are only 30 miles of paved roads.  Most of Lanai's roads are rocky, unpaved roads which leads us to #3... 

3- Pretty much if you want to go anywhere on Lanai you must have a 4x4 vehicle.  There are only TWO car rental companies on the island and they only rent jeeps.  Price?  $135/day.  Jaw dropper, right!?!  Keep that jaw dropped because...

4- There is only ONE gas station on the island and it is owned by one of the car rental agencies.  Cost of gas while we were there was $5.28/gal

 (milk wasn't priced much better at $9.00/gal)

5 - There is not a single traffic light on Lanai.

6 - There are 3 hotel options.  Two Four Season Resorts where the cheapest room is $300-$400/night and one local hotel called, Hotel Lanai (which I think I heard at one time is haunted).  There are also a couple of vacation rental houses.  We went with the vacation rental house because it was the best price for us and they offered their truck (see picture above) to us for cheaper than we could rent a jeep for.  We just had to fill up the front tire everyday because it had a slow leak.  Small price to pay for a cheaper rate.

(the nice couple who we had rented from still had their Christmas lights up)

   7 - Lani is only 18 miles long and 13 miles wide

8 - There are around 2,700-3,100 people who live on Lanai (I'm assuming that most of them work for Four Seasons because there were definitely not that many people in Lanai City).

9 - Lanai is a very dry island.  It gets the least annual rainfall of all of the Hawaiian islands because the mountains of Maui and Molokai capture all of the rain. 

10 - Lanai used to be known as the pineapple island, but they no longer grow pineapple there. 

11 - When you are in Lanai you almost feel like you are camping in the mountains because of all the pine trees.  The smell of pine on this island was awesome.  However, every single one of the Cook Pines (and they are all. over. the. island.) were planted.  Something to do with extracting moisture from the air. 

12 - There aren't many food and/or shopping options on Lanai and the hours of the business were hard to get used to.  There were 2 main grocery stores.  One closed at 7pm each night and the other closed at 8pm.  Most of the non grocery stores closed between 3-5pm.  The resturaunts (and there weren't many to choose from) had wierd hours.  Somedays they were open til 8pm, other days 5pm, then some days they weren't open at all (that doesn't count Sunday either).

It may have been a smaller, low key island but we absolutly loved Lanai.  It was like going back in time to the old Hawaii days.

Recap of Hawaii/Lanai days 7-10 coming soon...