Aloha & Mahaho Part 3

 DAY 5
We started out our day by going down to the beach and snorkeling. Then we headed a few miles down to Pipeline. They were having a junior surfing tournament so we sat on the beach for a while and watched. Chad probably could have spent all day at Pipeline. He LOVES watching surfing. Just ask our Netflix queue. If he can't watch it in real life you can find him watching it on tv.

Then we headed to Waimea Falls. It was about a mile walk on a paved path up to a waterfall. This tree was amazing.

I loved seeing this peacock wandering around.

 Chad and Justin braved the cold water, but Lori and I decided to skip it.

Lori and I hanging out on the rocks. Yes we were wimps, but I didn't regret it. The cons definitely outweighed the pros. Admittedly, it was cool to see the waterfall, but I don't know if it was worth the $15 each entry fee. Just sayin...

Seeing this rooster made me happy because he reminded me of Kauai.

Lori heard someone talking about a bunch of sea turtles hanging out on the beach down the road, so we hopped in the car to go find them. These were the only two still on the beach, but they were cool to watch and you could see a bunch swimming in the water near the shore. Do you know why they're called Green Sea Turtles? Because their innards are green. Just a little tidbit for ya.

 Then we headed to the cute little town of Haleiwa and of course went to the infamous Motsumotos for some more shave ice with ice cream. Holy cow that was sweet! But of course tasty.

DAY 6
We went down to the beach and relaxed and snorkeled. As we were laying there a woman not to far from us, down by the water called for help and yelled that someone needed CPR. We don't know what was wrong but a man kept going in and out of conscientousness. An ambulance came and picked him up, we never knew what happened to him. So that was...eventful.

Then we got changed and headed up to check out the temple.

 

 We spent the rest of the day and evening at the Polynesian Cultural Center. This was the boat parade. Pretty cool.

Here we are at the Luau

 This is where we met the taro roll. I don't know what taro is but it makes tasty purple rolls.

 After the Luau we went to the big production. It was pretty cool, especially when they started throwing fire.

DAY 7 (Don't worry, I'm almost done)

Our trip to Hanauma Bay. They had tons of space for snorkeling. We only covered about two of the sections. I heard some kids next to us touting that they'd seen a sea turtle, which got me excited, but I never got to see one.

This seal was taking a break on the beach near us.

DAY 8

 This is the last time we saw this view from our hotel room. It was bittersweet. I was sad to go but happy to get home to my kids. About a week after getting home I was ready to come back.

ALOHA HAWAII!

MAHALO for letting me reminisce about my trip.

Aloha & Mahalo Part 2

Day 3
We got up early to catch a boat tour on a catamaran going up the Nepali Coast. It's on the west side of the island where no one lives. The cliffs were amazing and it was so cool to see the sea life. Plus, another bonus, neither of us got seasick. Some did and they got to hang out at the back of the boat with a bucket. Not the way I'd like to spend 5 hours and $300.

It wasn't long after we got going that we ran into a huge pod of dolphins. There were at least 50 of them and they just hung out by our boat for a while. Our captain said they like to be pushed by the boat, it gives them momentum.

If you look close enough you can see one on the right side of the picture.

 

We caught the tail end of whale season so we got to see a bunch of whales. Even from the shore, if we looked long enough we'd always see whale spouts or tails off in the distance, but it was cool to get a closer look at them. We even got to see one breach. Whale sightings never got old. I loved it every time I got to see even just a spout in the distance.

 





The Nepali Cliffs were beautiful. Apparently they've filmed many movies on the Nepali Coast. Jurassic Park, at least one of the Indiana Jones', and more I can't think of right now.

The catamaran tour was probably one of my highlights on Kauai. We got to see many whales, dolphins, a sea turtle, many fish as we went snorkeling off the boat, and a flying fish. So cool!

 

Day 4

 

We left Kauai and headed back to Oahu. Before we left Kauai, I experienced a little bit of trauma. We were just about finished packing up, Chad put the covers back on the bed and there it was, a humongous spider crawling across our bed. I'm talking the size of a tarantula. Eek! Even now, writing about it makes my stomach queasy. I hate spiders and the thought that we had been sleeping with one for four nights makes me sick. I admit, even while on the other island and in a different hotel, I feared there may be some eight legged guest lurking in our room. We didn't kill it, we didn't tell anyone about it. We just left. I still feel bad about that. But it had disappeared somewhere and there's no way I was staying in that room a second longer with that thing in there. I grabbed my luggage and stuff and finished packing in the hall.

 

Now, on to happier memories...We picked up our friends Lori & Justin at their hotel in Honolulu and made our first stop at the restaurant Dukes on Waikiki Beach. It came highly recommended and we were told we must eat the Hula Pie. And that we did. Happily.

 

We then walked along the very crowded and unappealing Waikiki Beach. Holy Cow, you've gotta like crowds to hang out on that beach. I was happy we weren't staying in downtown Honolulu and we headed up to our resort at Turtle Bay on the North Shore. We loved staying in Turtle Bay. It was far away from the city, and quiet, and it reminded me a lot of Kauai with it's greenery.

This chapel was on the resort. I loved the view from inside.

 

BUT, before we even got to the resort we made two pit stops. We had to stop at the Dole plantation and check out the infamous pineapple ice cream we'd heard so much about (Apparently the all you can eat buffet lunch and gigantic Hula Pie we just ate an hour before didn't quite fill us up). It was definitely yummy. And lest I forget, I won a free box of chocolate macadamia nuts for picking the right key for the box (If you'd like me to expand I will, but not on this blog. Just know, it was very exciting for me. I love to win free things).

 This is the only picture I have of the Dole Plantation. These coy fish were crazy. They climbed over each other with their little mouths open wide, waiting for us to drop anything into them. Honestly, they freaked me out a little.

Then, on our way to the hotel we made another stop at Sunset Beach and watched the big waves. You can see Chad off to the left sitting on the sidewalk. No doubt, Chad could have just sat there for many more hours.

 

We finished our day off by wandering around the resort and on the reef by the resort, and of course hitting the pool and hot tub.

 

Must. Stop. Blogging. Now. Part 3 to come...



Aloha & Mahalo

This was my first trip to Hawaii and our first real tropical vacation together. It was so much fun! And of course beautiful. I definitely missed my boys and thought about them and worried about them, but we knew they were in good hands with grandma Judy. Aka "Papa" - That is what Gavin calls her and that's what I'll call her the rest of this post. When we left, Ethan was down and out with the flu, the one I had passed on to him, and Gavin is only two and I worried that he wouldn't know what was going on when mom and dad didn't come back for over a week. But kids are resilient, and they got over it. And we had fun - alone! I admit that when we saw families with small children it made me miss ours, but at the same time it made me glad they didn't come with us. It seemed like too much work for a vacation. Does that make me a bad parent? It'll be fun to take them in a few years when Gavin is a little older.

The morning we got back I went in to get Gavin. I slowly opened the door and peaked in on him, he was standing up in his crib, smiling, and anticipating Papa. When he saw me instead of Papa he looked shocked and fell to his knees in a crawling position and froze. I slowly approached his crib on my knees and told him I was back. He didn't want to look at me. He stared either down at the mattress or at the wall. After about a minute I was finally able to coax him into looking at me and letting me hold him and we went and hung out with daddy in bed. It didn't take him long to warm back up to us.

We traveled from Boise to San Jose on a small plane, the type where the propellers are out in the open air (something you don't see too much these days on newer planes) and we actually went outside to board the plane. It didn't help my nervousness of flying on an older plane as we watched various people go in and out of the cockpit. We never found out what was going on exactly, but we made it to San Jose...late, but luckily made our connecting flight without getting the chance to pee. I hate peeing on planes. We landed in Honolulu, lugged our luggage out of the airport, down a ways to another building, found out we were in the wrong place, then headed further away into another building where we caught our next flight to Kauai. We waited for a while in the small interisland airport. We realized we should have brought snacks cause we were too cheap to buy a $3 cookie. Eventually we did anyway and quickly realized that everything is overpriced, there's no getting around it.

After getting over the exhaustion of traveling all day and the shock of the almost $500 car rental for 4 days, we ended up here, at the Kauai Beach Resort. We had a beautiful view. We ate our breakfast every morning out on the lanai, watching the waves and the surfers and the paddle boarders. It was lovely.

Our days were filled with exploring and the evenings were spent in the hot tubs. It was the perfect combo. We were so tired, most nights we were asleep by 10:30.

By the time we arrived at our hotel it was late afternoon and it gets dark by 7pm so we just had time to eat an early dinner and check out the beach.

The first night we got our map out and decided we'd explore Kauai's east coast the next morning.

DAY 1
We found our way to "Baby Beach," called that because people bring their babies there because the water is so flat. We were just about the only ones there and we just relaxed on the sand. The water seemed so warm the night before near our resort, but I cringed when my toes touched the water at this beach so I didn't go in.

We continued further up the coast and found this cool lighthouse. We stopped at another beach and hung out for a while. It was cold and windy so again, we didn't get in the water. We saw some snorkelers out in the water and found out at that at that beach you can usually find sea turtles within 5 minutes of being in the water. We hoped to be able to come back sometime when we had snorkel gear. Unfortunately we didn't have time to return to that beach and I never got to see sea turtles while snorkeling for the rest of our time in Hawaii. Oh well, maybe next time.

 We then headed up to Hanalei Bay. It's a cool little town with shops. It's where I experienced my first shave ice (note: it's not shaved ice with a d, but shave ice). The waves there were by far the best we saw our whole trip because they weren't huge and they weren't tiny. They were perfect for boogie boarding, body surfing, and surfing. I was sure the water would be warmer on some other part of the island, but quickly learned it was the same everywhere and after a minute of being in it, it'd be bareable. I didn't learn that until the next day, so I didn't go in the water here either. Chad braved the water and went body surfing for a while, but I sat on the beach and braved the rain instead. It was still enjoyable. I'm glad I brought a sweatshirt (the only sweatshirt I had on the trip, I might add).

DAY 2
We headed south. On our way south we made sure to find Costco and buy some snorkeling gear. We didn't want to miss out on any more underwater sea life.

 We loved this tunnel of trees

 This is Poipu Beach. This was probably one of my favorite spots in Kauai. If you look behind me you'll see the sand bar that separates the water. We did some fun snorkeling on both sides.

 I loved the chickens and roosters everywhere on Kauai. On the side of the road. At our resort. And yes, they even hung out at the beach.

Salt Pond Beach. This was another cool spot for snorkeling.

To be continued... (I think I've blabbed enough for one day)