Hawaii Part 1

We made it back to the mainland in one piece with only minimal sunburn and tons of pictures! It was absolutely beautiful and incredibly peaceful. Hawaii is one of those places that everywhere you turn looks like a postcard. Our flight was nonstop from Denver and was one of the smoothest flights I've ever been on. It was our first time on United and we were impressed. They played a game called "Halfway to Hawaii" and the object of the game was to guess at what time, to the nearest second, we crossed the geographical halfway point on our trip. Matt came within 7 seconds of guessing the correct time! I was off by 8 minutes even with all my mathematical calculations.

The high humidity is always a shock for us but there seemed to almost always be a nice breeze so it ended up not being too bad. This is the view from our cottage's lanai. We were really happy with our choice once we got used to the little inconveniences that come along with indoor/outdoor tropical living.


By the time we went grocery shopping and got settled in it was time for bed on our first day but the second day we ventured out to the beach. Next door to our community was a Polo field.

We came to refer to this beach as "Our Beach" because we rarely saw anyone there. The water was surprisingly warm and incredibly clear. Where we stationed ourselves we could stay close to the shore but still be in deep water. We tried to be conscious of sunscreen but SPF 50 was just not enough to protect against the Hawaiian sun and we got a little crispy on our first outing to the beach.


Our beach is also the home to one of the island's nude beaches - as you can tell from our nude friend. We saw other nudists later in our trip but they tended to stay to themselves but it made for interesting sightseeing!


The second day we were there we decided to do some exploring of the North Shore so we drove and just stopped when came across something that looked interesting.



A little island that is called Chinaman's Hat. Looks more like the Sorting Hat from Harry Potter if you ask me!


All along the North Shore are these lunch wagons that serve shrimp. Apparently this one is quite popular so we stopped and had lunch there.


I got the Shrimp Scampi - yummy and deliciously messy!


Matt got the Hot and Spicy which has a disclaimer that there are no refunds after purchase. This picture was a few shrimp into his lunch before he started tearing up!


There were tons of fruit stands on the side of the road so we had to stop and get a real Hawaiian pineapple.

When we got back from exploring we were sitting out on our lanai enjoying the cool breeze from Felicia and Matt caught sight of some turtles right outside our cottage. There were 3 or 4 of them swimming around eating off the rocks close to shore. They move quickly and come up only for a second for air so getting pictures took some time!

Felicia hit Oahu on Wednesday and brought with her a lot of clouds and drizzle most of the day. We decided to head down to Honolulu and drive around. We lunch at a burger place called Cheeseburger in Paradise and that pretty much summed up lunch. It was probably one of the most delicious burgers I've ever had. After that we went to check out the Waikiki Aquarium figuring that we could see some different and interesting sea life. Unfortunately there wasn't much to see there and we spent a grand total of 20 min there!

Dinner was at Haleiwa Joe's. I got a crab and avocado salad which was pretty and yummy!