Wednesday, May 21, 2014

Aloha! #1


I wasn't sure how I wanted to post our trip to Hawaii.  Should I just mention the highlights? Or should I risk being a total bore and giving all the details?  I tend to get kinda chatty, which would result in a very long tedious yawner, so I think I'll try to divide it up into several posts, one post = one day.  That would be kind of a happy medium between "not enough" and "too much".  Our trip was cut short sorta unexpectedly, so we were there only 4 days, so I will divide it up among 4 blogs.  See?  I am already getting too chatty.  (don't yawn already, it's contagious!)

This is my daughter Kayla.  By habit I call her PeeWee, so if I type in PW, you will know who I'm referring to.  She just graduated from high school, AND she's turning 18 in a couple weeks, so we decided to combine the two celebrations and do something "big" for her and take her somewhere where she's never been to before.



We arrived in Honolulu on Friday night.  It was DARK and very HUMID, two things that we are not used to this time of year.  I knew right off the bat that I was gonna HATE my hair the whole time we were there.  Anyhoo, after we got our rental car, we raced to the commissary on Hickam AFB to get some vittles before they closed (we barely made it). We knew that Oahu was a tourist trap, so we figured eating CHEAP was one way to save us a bit of excessive spending.  We lived on PB&J as much as we could.  Ate cold cereal for breakfast.  A little note here:  I found out that I was no longer used to consuming regular milk (...stomache ache!)

Okay, at Bellows Air Force Station, this is the cabin we stayed in:


The background is  not the sky; it is the OCEAN, and it provided a very soothing sound at night to lull us to sleep.

When we settled into our cabin on Friday night, we found our cabin counselor right away:


He was there to reassure us that we could sleep well because he had us covered, as far as bugs go.  After we went to bed we could hear him calling "gecko!"  which means "another one bites the dust".

Every morning I thought maybe I could sleep in a little bit, but no, those loud birds woke me up around 5:30 every morning.  So we'd lay there for about an hour (trying to sleep) but always ended getting up before 7:00 because those birds were just too loud.  But it was all good because the  morning is the BEST time to go for a stroll on the beach.



After eating our "stomach ache" cereal, we decided that we would go horse backing riding at the Kuaola Ranch where they had these "roosters" and "chickens" running around all over.


And some mangy-looking cats that looked like they needed some food and vet care.


So here we are on the horses.



My horse was named "Blue".  Chuck's horse was named "Hercules", and PW couldn't remember the name of her horse.

I really liked those trees they had there.  I guess they are "monkey pods".  


When we came to a fork in the path, our guide wasn't sure if we were allowed to go the way they usually go (on the one-hour tour), so she called back at the office and asked them.  They said we couldn't go "that way" because they had some movie sets down there and weren't allowing anyone in there.  So we had to take a different route and wonder what movie they were making down there.  

We opted to take the one-hour tour, but if we had taken the two-hour tour, this is what we would've seen (for all you "Lost" fans out there):


We were SO CLOSE to the site where they filmed Hurley's golf course!!!!  Cool, huh?  BTW, this is actually a picture of a framed picture that they were selling in their gift store.  

So after we got done with the horse tour, we drove around for awhile and then went back to the cabin to eat, and then me and PW played in the ocean.  In the evening, we went for a walk on Bellows AFS where they had some trails.  They had this nature trail with different kinds of trees in it that were pretty cool to see, like this banyan tree:


Does this tree look familiar to all you "Lost" fans?  The banyan tree is the tree that you can hide in when the smoke monster is chasing you.  The interesting thing about the banyan tree is that the roots grow from the branches downward into the soil.

So that was Day 1.










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