Hawaii Day 7 - Waimea Bay and the Turtles

Ok, so it's been like seven months since we were in Hawaii, but I never caught up, so I'm doing it now because I don't want to study for my test :)

After our hike up to the falls we were pretty dead, so we decided to relax a little bit and spend the day at the beach. First we went to Waimea Bay and spent a couple of hours just relaxing on the beach and playing in the ocean, we then headed up the coast a little bit to turtle beach. It's a little beach where the sea turtles come up to sun bathe. When we first got there, there were no turtles, so we sat down and waited and finally we saw one swimming around in the ocean and he kept getting closer and closer, and then he swam away. The same thing happened again, then we started to put on some sunscreen and then all of a sudden one of the turtle protection ladies was roping off a turtle like 10 feet away. It was nuts. We relaxed some more, had a nice dinner and then went home for the evening.

Fall 2008

Bryce Canyon

Back side of Bryce Canyon. This is one of the gorgeous views from Dad's property in Kanab.

Kelsea learning how to milk a goat. She thought it was disgusting :).

Shuttle ride in Zion's National Park

Beautiful Zion

Kanab

Hawaii Day 6 - Malaikahana Falls and the Temple

Tuesday morning we got up and drove back to Laie to go to Malaikahana Falls. Michi had been once before with Casey. It’s about a two hour hike up into the mountains, and the hike itself is pretty cool. It starts out as a dirt trail without too much foliage around for about the first hour. When you get near the end of that part of the trail, there are some pretty spectacular views of the ocean. Then, the trail abruptly enters a narrow part surrounded by these cool thin and tall trees (see picture below). The next hour is up and down and in and out of those trees until you get come down and it’s like the river comes out of no where. There are three waterfalls up there, and they’re really beautiful. Unfortunately, they were only down to a trickle while we were up there, but there it was still worth the hike. The way down wasn’t quite so fun. We were meeting Dave and Jenny so we could go to the temple that night, so we decided to get going a little earlier than we needed to. Unfortunately, we had taken a “short cut” (unbeknownst to us) on the way to the falls through an unmarked part of the trail that wasn’t actually part of the trail. That meant that when we tried to go back the way we came, we got really turned around and confused because there was no trail and no trail markers or anything. It actually was pretty scary because we really had no idea where to go. After about 20 minutes of retracing our steps and turning ourselves around, we said a quick prayer, Michi stayed where she was and I just took off up the mountain in the direction we thought the trail was. We stayed within yelling distance of each other, and after a little while I found the trail and we started back. We were late, so as soon as we came out of the trees we started running down the hill. What had taken us an hour to climb took like 15 minutes to get down.

After taking a quick shower, we had a quick dinner with Dave and Jenny. It was breadfruit and fish in a coconut milk garlic sauce. The breadfruit they had picked from a tree, and Jenny (no joke) caught the fish earlier that day with a rope, a hook, and bread as bait, so the meal cost like a dollar for all four of us, and it tasted great. Then, as we were walking through the temple doors we realized that we both had left our wallets at home. We got in the habit of leaving them at home because Michi said the islanders like to steal. We knew we had to call the bishop, but it was 8 o’clock Hawaii time, so midnight in Utah, but we figured that he’s Hawaiian so he’d understand, which he did. It was actually quite funny because all of the temple workers we talked to knew him personally. Oh, and the temple worker behind the desk was none other than Coach K :). For those of you who don’t know, Coach K (short for Kaliukalani, not Coach K from Duke University) has been a good friend of my father’s for years. We had a wonderful evening in the temple, and it was a really nice close to a very busy day.

Day 5 - Kayaking

On Monday we decided to head out to Kailua to do some kayaking. When we called ahead of time to check the conditions the lady said it was a good day. Vanessa was a little skeptical because it was so windy, but we decided to go anyway. We rented the kayak at a shop about a quarter mile from the beach and dragged it on a little cart over to the beach, unloaded it, and dragged it through the sand into the ocean. The wind ended up being pretty strong and it was really hard to row against, especially because unless you are going right against or with the wind it pushes your kayak left or right and you have to paddle more on one side than the other, so you're constantly correcting and overcorrecting and recorrecting and you're course winds up looking a lot more like a lightning bolt than a straight line. Anyway, we kayaked out to a little bird sanctuary island, took some pictures and then went over to Lanikai beach and we snorkeled a little bit. The way back was a lot easier because the wind was at our back. We were pretty tired afterward, I hadn't had an upperbody workout like that in a while. On our way home we grabbed some really good kalua pork and then just had a nice relaxing evening together. (I'll post pictures later)

Day 4 - Temple and Coconuts

We stayed the night on Saturday at a friend's house in Laie after the night show at the PCC. We stayed at one of Michelle's friend's (Dave and Jenny) house and went to church with them the next morning. After church we went and walked around the temple site and took some pictures. We went for a walk along a nearby beach looking for coconuts and found three of them. Dave is as close to a native Hawaiian as you can get for a white guy from California, so he showed me how to husk a coconut, which is no easy task. Natives put a shark stick in the ground, put the coconut on top and then twist so that pieces of the husk rip off in large chunks. We didn't have a sharp stick, so we used a pick-axe instead. It took Dave like 30 seconds to get the first one husked...about 8 minutes later I finally got the first piece of husk to come off of the second coconut. After that it only took a minute or two to get the rest off. I triumphantly smashed the coconut into a sharp rock and the coconut water flowed from the crack like dew from the heavens (I was just reading Amber's blog and saw her superb use of simile and thought I'd give it a try). Using a blunt rusted piece of iron that looked like a flat jagged spoon, we shredded the coconut, placed the shreddings within the fibrous remains of coconut husk, and, the same way you wring out a wet shirt, we twisted the fibers to squeeze out the coconut cream. As a sidenote, raw coconut shavings taste much much sweeter than just big chunks of the coconut meat, somehow shaving it allows the juices to come out so that the the shavings are really moist and taste wonderfully sweet even if the meat is a little dull and dry. Jenny looked up a recipe for coconut scones from a Tongan website (it included 4 ingredients (flour, coconut cream, baking powder, and salt to taste, and, no joke, said to bake it in a "hot oven" for 12 minutes), and we made those and some pina coladas with the cream. It was awesome, I felt really Hawaiian. After that we spent the evening chatting with Aaron Doxey and his wife Amy. Michi knows Aaron from Provo High, and Aaron lives right next door to Dave's parents (the house where we did all the coconut preparation stuff). Then we drove home, played Mexican Train Dominos with Vanessa and Edgar, and went to bed.

Day 3 - Breakfast on the Lanai, Shark's Cove, Sunset Beach, and the PCC

We woke up to the smell of bacon (it was actually turkey bacon dad, so no worries) and eggs. Vanessa had made us breakfast, which we ate out on the lanai (balcony). I have yet to mention that not only are Vanessa and Edgar letting us stay for free, but they also have let us use a car for the whole time we've been here. We were planning on just using the bus system, but Edgar's 94-year-old father has an old Honda Accord that they recently confiscated from him after following him and seeing him almost get into a very scary accident. They have very graciously allowed us to use it for the time being. We hopped in the car and drove through Honolulu to the western part of the North Shore. After a quick stop at the Dole Plantation to grab some pineapple floats (their famous pineapple ice cream in pineapple juice), we headed up the coast to Shark's Cove and snorkeled around a little bit in the rocks and saw some cool fish. At one point I looked up and realized I was completely surrounded by a school of about 1000 fish. We moved up the shore a little bit and I tried to boogie-board and mostly got thrashed by the waves, it was really fun. Michi was looking out over the water and suddenly she yelled to me to come over. She spotted a school of dolphins that were jumping out of the water. We made a video, but we were also trying to watch the dolphins, so it isn't the highest quality (see below). We got to Laie that night and got tickets to the night show at the Polynesian Cultural Center. The show was great, we especially liked the fire dancers.

Hawaii Day 2 - Pele's Chair, the Lighthouse, Rain, Fireworks, and Fresh Fish

On day 2, we started off by hiking to Pele's chair, a rock formation on the southeast end of the island. We continued further to a lighthouse that is still in use and took a few pictures. After a lunch break we went to a beach that was about 15 minutes away that Vanessa told us about. It's sort of hidden behind a residential area and has beautiful white sand, and the ocean is very calm. After about a half an hour Michi said it was going to rain soon (I chalk it up to women's intuition and living here for a full summer, unfortunately it's uncanny how often she's right about these sort of things). I tried to convince her to stay, but she insisted, so we packed up our stuff, went to the car, and with about 10 steps left to get to the car, it started to rain. Soon it was pooring pretty hard, so we ate our lunches in the car and it was actually pretty fun. We took a quick nap hoping the rain would stop...that turned into an hour and a half nap. That night we went to Waikiki, caught the last part of a show at the Hilton, and saw the weekly firework show on the beach, and had fun playing with our camera, which got some remarkable shots of the fireworks. Vanessa suggested we take a coupon and eat at a local restaurant, so on the way home we stopped and had a romantic dinner together. There was a live band and the waitresses danced hula.