hawaii

A bunch of things fell into place and we had the opportunity to go to Hawaii last week. Let us just say that Hawaii is AMAZING.

We had originally planned to take Jonah, but my mom offered to watch him the whole week (yes, she's a saint). We missed him so much and he was so cute when we got home. He was really excited to see us. If we could have found a way to transport him there without the flight and the time change, we would have taken him for sure.

And we got to stay with Scott's cousin who is graduating this semester from BYU-Hawaii. Adam and Stacey were the best hosts and helped us have the perfect vacation. We stayed up way too late every night (like 1 am, which is 5 am Utah time) playing Hand and Foot and Hearts, eating a lot of popcorn, and laughing a little too hard.

We had a blast and we want to go back........so bad.

I have a million pictures, so here are a small fraction of them. There are just not words to explain Hawaii. I used to think it was overrated because everyone went there, but Hawaii is not overrated. It is AMAZING.

We started off at the Dole Pineapple Plantation. It definitely wasn't the highlight of the trip, but we learned some interesting things and got the yummy pineapple ice cream.

This is how a pineapple grows. They cut the tops off of ripe pineapples and plant them in the ground and then the fruit grows out the top. Kind of neat - we had no idea how pineapples grew.

We rented a Jeep. It was fun, but we had to keep the top on most of the time because it rained pretty much every day.

Then we headed to Waimea Beach on the North Shore. The North Shore was definitely our favorite spot. It is really chill, the waves get big, and the beaches are gorgeous.

We even saw a celebrity at Waimea! Adrian Brody walked by us a couple times so I had to snap a picture.

A turtle on Turtle Beach. I had no idea how huge these things were. There are people who rope them off and make sure tourists don't touch them. Apparently they know all the turtles by name.

After Waimea and Turtle, we went into Hale'iwa to get Matsumotos shave ice. If you go, get it with ice cream and condensed milk. Sounds weird, but it is so good. This picture is on Sunset Beach. We were going to watch the sunset, but it was too cloudy.

The next day, we went to the Polynesian Cultural Center. It was really interesting and we had a good time at each of the shows. Our favorite was the Samoan show. We loved it so much we went twice. The Samoan guy was hilarious. I kind of have a secret wish to be Polynesian now.

Wednesday was snorkeling at Hanauma Bay, swap meet, and Pearl Harbor. We loved Hanauma Bay--lots of cool fish around the coral. There's not much to say about the swap meet other than WOW. It's a little like Canal Street in NYC - too overwhelming for me. Pearl Harbor was also really cool. That night, we went to the BYU-H basketball game because they were in the NCAA Divison II Sweet Sixteen (I think). They played Cal Poly-Pomona. They ended up losing by ONE POINT in the last three seconds. It was so sad, but it was a really fun game. The Polynesian students were crazy.

The next day was cloudy in the morning, so we played around on Hukilau Beach for a while until it got too cold. This was the day that they had the earthquake in Fiji and Tonga and there was a tsunami advisory for Hawaii. We were glad nothing happened.

It cleared up in the afternoon, so we went down to the tide pools at Sharks Cove and hiked up on top of the reef. It was pretty neat. Pretty soon, the tide started rising so we decided it probably wouldn't be safe to be up there. Usually the waves crash over the top of the reef and down into the tide pools.

These are the pools from on top of the reef.

Then we went to Banzai Pipeline and watched the surfers for a while. There were some crazy good surfers and a lot of them were girls and little kids. Crazy. These waves were pretty big, but nothing like they get in January.

Then we watched the sunset on Sunset Beach. It was a little cloudy so we couldn't see the horizon, but it was beautiful nonetheless. I didn't edit any of the sunset pictures at all. That is what the sunsets really look like.

Same sunset closer up.

The next day, we had planned on hiking Chinaman's Hat but Adam couldn't go with us and I kind of chickened out (you wade through 200 yards of ocean and then hike up the island that looks like a Chinaman's hat). Before we left, Adam told us to not get eaten by sharks, so that freaked me out a little bit. Instead, we went back to Waimea. It was gorgeous the whole day. That was our favorite beach by far.

Scott wanted a picture of him with his boogie board. But don't tell him I told you that. He will get mad at me.

This sunset at Waimea was absolutely gorgeous. The picture does not do it justice.

The last full day, we went down to Waikiki, where we saw this crazy fellow. He was dancing up on the rock wall in this awesome get-up. Who knows what sorts of drugs were pumping through his system.

We also decided to take surfing lessons. It was worth every penny. I didn't get any pictures of both of us because they wanted to charge us a meager $60 for a CD with all of our photos that they took. That was almost more than the lesson itself! But surfing was a blast. We both got up pretty much everytime and we were exhausted after our time was up from the paddling. It is hard work. After we were done with the lesson, we could rent the boards for $5 (the cheapest thing in Waikiki), so Adam and Scott went out. Adam was pumped because he tried surfing before but could never get up and he got up a couple times.

Waikiki was fun because it has the big city feel and there is great shopping, but there were just way too many people.

The sunset was also gorgeous there.

After our day in Waikiki, we went to Duke's for dinner. It was really yummy. We sat on the patio and I had the best fish tacos I've ever had in my life.

The whole group. After dinner, Scott and I did some shopping and then stayed in a hotel that night.

We flew home the next day to our baby and snow. The snow was depressing, but seeing Jonah definitely was not. We had such a great time and we cannot wait until we get to go back...probably not for a VERY long time.