Blue Hawaii

This year we did something really big and crazy and went to Hawaii for our summer vacation.  It was really fun, but we are sure glad to be home.  It almost feels like a joke when we talk about the heat in Idaho being a "dry heat," but it really does make a difference.  It was frequently in the low to mid 80s, but it felt sweltering.  It just drains the energy out of you.

Right off the bat our trip started crazy - as soon as we got to our gate we saw that our flight to San Francisco was delayed by over two hours, which would cause us to miss our connection to Honolulu.  So we got rescheduled to fly though LA, but that changed our departure to about 3 in the afternoon.  In the end, that meant we landed in Honolulu at about 10:30 at night.  Getting our luggage, our rental car, some food, and drove to the house, and showered, we finally got to bed after 2:00.  Considering the time difference, that had us feeling like it was 6:00 the next morning!

A friend of Teri's who had moved to Honolulu about six months ago met us at the airport and gave us a real Hawaiian welcome, with leis and everything.  They were very cool - we had them over for a lunch barbeque that weekend, and met up with them later in the week at a big swap meet where we bought some souvenirs.  Here's Teri and I in our leis (well, I don't know if mine is actually a lei, but it's pretty cool):

We got to Hawaii so late, we couldn't really see anything, but we woke up to a beautiful view.  We decided to rent a house instead of staying in a hotel, and we're very glad we did.  We visited Waikiki once during our trip, and it was so noisy and crowded, and Honolulu is such a big city, we were glad that we had decided to stay in the country where it was quiet and beautiful.
Here's the house we stayed in, the "Mushroom House":

This was our backyard:

I made this cool panorama of the view from our backyard.  It was just beautiful:

And in front, just across the road, there was this beach:

There were coconut trees growing all over our yard, and so Ashlee decided she wanted to try and open and eat one.  I helped her get it open.  It was pretty cool:

Our house had these little geckos in it, and we saw one every now and then scurrying up the wall or across the floor.  At first, we thought it was a little weird, but we got to love them.  They're kind of cute and they eat the bugs, so that's good.  They also make the most amazing sound - a clicking/chuckling sound that sounds way too big for these little lizards.  Here's Christine holding one we found on the table.  It was in the process of molting, so its skin looks a little weird:

One of our first outings was to the Byodo-In Japanese temple.  It was really neat:

There was a huge koi pond surrounding the temple, and in one area, people were feeding them, and they were going nuts.  It was like a boiling pool of fish:

We went kayaking, but it turns out that I totally couldn't handle it.  I guess I'm terrified of the ocean.  Well, this was as far as I got before I had to go back:

Happily, the tour company let us change up and gave a refund for me and let Teri and the girls go without me, which was totally fine by me.  Here they are getting ready to head out again:

This time Christine got to be in her own kayak (in the background to the right in the picture below) while Teri and Ashlee had a tandem kayak (in the middle):

They kayaked out to this little island, and got to hang out and explore:

We went to the west side of the island so we could see the sunset.  It was beautiful:

Our visit to the Polynesian Cultural Center was really cool.  It's where we saw our first hibiscus flowers, which is the Hawaii state flower:

Here's a some pictures of our visit.  If you ever go to Oahu, I think the Polynesian Cultural Center is a must see:

We had a luau dinner at the center, and it was really awesome.  I loved the poke, which is marinated raw ahi tuna, and of course the luau pig.  Ashlee and I even tried poi, which was interesting.

We had surf lessons, which I tried to do, but couldn't.  The girls had fun, especially Christine who really took to it.  One thing though, we all got a little banged up - while there was sand on the beach, there was lava rock just under the water.  We all got scraped and cut a little, especially Christine.  She still had fun, though:

Here's some pictures of Christine catching some waves:

And a little action montage:

On our last day, we went to a beach near the house, and just hung out and had fun.  It was really nice:

Our last day we also went to this interesting buffet (that was more Japanese than I expected, but I enjoyed it) that had a little show during dinner.  The girls learned how to dance:

In the end, we had tons of fun, but were glad to be home.  It was really cool.