Sunday, March 29, 2009

Hawaii Adventures

This year Helaman and I celebrated his spring break week with a trip to Hawaii! Here are some highlights!

Airplane shot of Oahu

Barely made our plane to Honolulu from Dallas on March 11 after dropping off Charlotte at Play-Dough summer camp with Grandma.

Checked into the Ilikai Hotel on Waikiki Beach. My parents let us use their time share there this year. Thanks!! It was really nice to be so close to the beach.
That night we walked out to the ocean. Not too many swimmers at night! So we headed to the spa.View from the hotel's roof restaurant. This is where we went to a timeshare sales pitch in order to get some money for activities.
Next day brought Hanauma Bay snorkeling and laying around. Just what I needed.
Saturday it rained and we headed to a huge swap meet in Aloha Stadium where we bought a lot of random Hawaiian stuff. Here is Helaman drinking from a coconut.
Luckily later that night it cleared up and we went to dinner right on the beach at Duke's.

The LDS Chapel in Honolulu.
USS Arizona Memorial at Pearl Harbor.
Monday bright and early we headed to the North Shore where we had a shark cage outing!
More pictures will be coming on this one when we get our underwater camera film developed. It was really fun and different from most things you can do in Hawaii. The sharks were about 10-12 feet and they came right up to the boat when the guides started throwing fish out. It was cool to see them so near to the boat, and even more amazing to see them underwater closely circling the floating cage we were in. We could have reached out and touched them - obviously that wasn't advised.
Survived! High recommend! From the boat we also saw a huge whale having some fun in the ocean breaching.
Afterward we stopped by the Hawaiian Temple in Laie which is under renovation.Here we are the next day at Valley of Temples Memorial Park, which is a huge graveyard with temples like this Byodo-In Temple, built to commemorate the first Japanese immigrants to Hawaii.Then we headed to Kualoa Ranch for an ATV tour of all the places they film movies and shows.The ranch was beautiful and we especially loved the fresh guava you could pick from the trees and eat whole! Here we are at the Jurassic Park location.
Here's the Pearl Harbor film location. I don't remember that movie so well, but LOST fans will recognize this structure as a Dharma station, specifically where Jack and Juliette kissed.
At Hurley's Golf Course.
We both climbed up this tower from the "Jughead" episode. Remember, the bomb was buried.
Last stop on our way home was to the blowhole lookout. From here you could see many humpback whales surfacing.Goodbye Hawaii - til next time!

8 comments:

Heather Lynn said...

Oh my goodness, I had no idea that you guys went there. SO FUN! I loved the pics.

Rob and Sarah said...

It looks like you guys had a lot of fun! It makes me want to take a vacation!

Reagan said...

oh man, you went from nice weather to nicer weather. it's still pretty much winter here!!

Kelleen said...

That looks like it was awesome. How fun that you guys got to get away and enjoy yourselves(without the kiddo).

Unknown said...

What a fun vacation! Is it bad that I totally want to go to Hawaii now even though we just got back from our own vacation 3.5 days ago?

Malesa said...

How fun. All I can say is one word - jealousy!

Unknown said...

Cool trip. I remember when your parents went to Hawaii. ( i don't know why i remember that!) Glad you had fun and Happy Birthday!

Unknown said...

such fun! Jake and I were just sitting here looking and it was like a replay of our trip last year! but you guys saw even more stuff and the sharks!