Hawaii...

I guess a Hawaiian vacation is worth a short blog post.  For spring break this year, Cameron's family took us to Hawaii with them.  Cam's parents, his two brothers (Drew and Zac), Drew's girlfriend (Caitlin), and Cameron's dad's brother Randy were all there.   We flew into Honolulu on Oahu and stayed in Waikiki the first two nights at a Hyatt right on the beach.  This first picture is of the beach there.  It doesn't look anywhere near as crowded as it actually was.  Even if I took the tippiest toeiest steps, I was kicking sand all over everybody around me... and nobody really seemed to notice or care... very bizarre.  Also, there are SO many asians there and all the signs are in Chinese and English.  I don't really like crowds so I was happy when those first two days were over and we got to "move in" to the rental house up on the north shore.

Our house was in a town called Wailea, but the little surfing town where we spent most of our afternoons/evenings/whenever we were hungry was called Haleiwa.  Our favorite beach was called Waimea... which we liked to say like a whiny Italian kid wondering, "Whya Mea?".  The picture above this is of a view of Waimea bay from an awesome little lookout point we found by taking a little hike up around a nearby neighborhood.  The sun was just starting to set and it was so pretty!   That big rock closest to the beach always has a bunch of people standing on it waiting to jump off... and occasionally people will actually jump.  It was really fun to watch everyone get nervous once they were up there.  Cameron's dad and brother jumped, but it was too cold for me to even think about going near the water, or about taking my hoodie off.  The evenings got pretty chilly pretty fast, and I'm a little bit of a wimp about cold water.  

 One of my favorite activities was going to Kailua Ranch on the East side of the island.  It was so gorgeous and we got to explore AND ride four-wheelers! (I haven't done that since I broke my wrist doing that three years ago!) We had to leave home at like 7 in the morning to get there on time, and we spent the morning on a "private" "island" that wasn't really private OR an island, but it was still really fun and we got to kayak, lay out, AND explore!  Then in the afternoon we rode ATVs and took a Jeep up a mountain with a crazyman driver who told us about history and movies and other crazyman things.

I also loved going to the Polynesian Cultural Center, which is in Laie and put on by BYU-Hawaii.   When I worked for the BYU telefund I had to call a lot of people to see if they wanted to donate to it, so I had heard a lot of good things about it.  I also took a Polynesian Dance class at BYU from a nice lady named Tu'ia who used to dance at the PCC, so I really wanted to see the performance and eat some Lu'au food.  Cameron, his mom and his little brother Zac all came with me and I think it was a smashing success.  It was really expensive though, so I'll probably never go again... But it was definitely a really fun time for a one-time activity.

We also tried these "hot dogs" called ... something that wasn't "hot dogs" and they were pretty delicious, but there were all these pigeons around trying to scavenge for food.  We saw this one who only had one leg and we felt really bad for it and were about to give it some food, when it just walked off perfectly natural WITH TWO LEGS.  That bird was trying to scam us.   Anyway, so if you see any one-legged birds, don't let them scam you.  They just learned from a really smart old master bird that retracting one of your legs up into your body is a good way to get snacks from strangers.  And THAT is a lesson for ALL of us.

Well, there's a lot more I could say about how pretty Hawaii is, or how nice it was to be back home and in charge of my own itinerary again, or how awesome Cameron's family is at playing scum, or about how I have a ton of other pictures up on facebook and could've just posted a link instead of writing a whole blog's worth of stuff... BUT... I think I'd prefer to end on the bird story.  because it's my favorite.  WELP! See ya!