Hawaii!

That's right. You can be jealous. Landon and I just spent a week in Hawaii liven' it up.  Make up for lost time, you know. There are a lot of pictures, but you might appreciate that I got it down from about 300 to 30.  

We ended up getting to Hawaii about 6 hours later than planned because of the stupid airlines.  We had about every possible problem imaginable, other than maybe crashing, in our 4 flights with United Airlines.  Never fly with them if you can help it. Anyways, we got to Honolulu on Monday and checked in to our hotel, then went along the main drag along the beach and did some shopping.  They have quite the night life in Waikiki, with lots of fun street performers that can only be there if they ask for donations instead of sales, ha. 

We got a sweet deal on this hotel.  It was awesome, and had a great view. 

Wishing I could play the Ukulele, but I'm not that cultural.

We did some bartering with people at the markets.  Those Hawaiian women are good at sales.  We had several insist that we needed to have children, and one tried to sell us the fertility tiki to help :)

Landon played with some birds at the International Market Place.
Apparently they are really used to people!

A look at the Hilton and skyline around Waikiki beach.

On Tuesday we drove to Pearl Harbor and the Polynesian Cultural Center.  Both were amazing.  We learned that the stress of traveling is not Landon's favorite, but we got there alright.

The USS Missouri-last battleship used by the U.S., last time was in Vietnam I think.   

We got to tour through the whole battleship, which was cool to see how the sailors lived.  We decided it would be much better assigned to a battleship than a submarine.  It was huge!  Afterwards, we took the tour to the USS Arizona.  For those who don't know, it was one of the ships sunk in the attack on Pearl Harbor, with over a thousand sailors still inside. The Government decided to leave it sunk and build the memorial over the tomb in memory of those who gave their lives.  They show a video before you go so you see footage and information about Pearl Harbor, the events leading up to the attack, and some pictures and photos on that "day that will live in infamy".  It was a cool experience. 

Then we drove over to the PCC.

Landon was pretty enamored with the tikis the whole trip.  We learned that they have grimaces and scary faces because they are supposed to chase away evil.  Each tiki has a different meaning (happiness, money, luck, etc.), and the length of their hair is significant but I don't remember how. Landon thinks that in the tribes, the longer the hair, the higher the status in the tribe, and the more power they had.

With a pretty legit warrior from Fiji, with a slightly darker tan.

They do a canoe pageant, where people from each island come out and dance on the canoes as they pass.  I put these pics in so you could see some of the cultural dress.

The Hawaiian royalty.  We learned that one of the famous kings was 7'6", and only average.
The Hawaiians were HUGE people. The Mauris were said to be around 8' tall! But then they intermixed with other cultures--japanese, white, etc. and are now smaller.

The Aerotearo Islands, AKA New Zealand doing the Haka

I'm pretty sure Tahiti is my favorite.  They do the fast booty shakin' dance and it amazes me every time, ha.  This is a video of a slower portion of the dance.

Samoa.  The men dancing shook the canoes and made the paddler fall in.  He's on the verge in the picture.

Fiji

Hawaii

Tonga.  They also had a show using the drums that was really cool. 

We did one of the contests where you throw spears at a target.  They say the best warriors and chiefs had the greatest aim.  Landon was pretty much a stud and hit the bullseye twice.  Even the native guy showing us how to do it didn't get that close even once.  "I pretty much could have been chief," he told me.

And, they did free cultural tattoos, so we got them for fun--as a cultural thing of course.

On a canoe ride.  Our paddler/tour guide for the ride always called us "cousins", and was pretty hilarious.

The Dum Dum statue like on Night At The Museum.

We got to go to a luau, which was great!  I even tried the poi, or raw marinated fish.  Not my favorite, but not bad.  They also had all the couples celebrating anniversaries or on honeymoons come up and dance in front.  Landon would have won the award for best moves if there was one.  He threw in some twirls and a dip or two to keep it exciting. 

The Samoans had some cool shows, like the guys who climbed palm trees, and the video below is a junior champion at fire twirling.

They also had weaving with palm leaves, a drums show, learning to hula, and singing with rainsticks that we had fun with.  And at night there was a show that was amazing too.  It was a pretty sweet place, we highly recommend it.  We got to stop by the temple and see the grounds on the way home.  I learned that the church bought all the land from the temple to the beach so there would be an unobstructed view down that road.  They even put the power lines under ground.  It's really pretty. 

It was a busy day, but tons of fun.  

Oh, and we also got some airbrush tattoos while at the PCC.  Our scuba guide told Landon his was the coolest one he had seen, and then he saw mine and retracted his statement, ha.  Not sure if it should be flattering or creepy, but the 60 year old guide said it was pretty sexy, ha.

I'll have to post our underwater pictures later after we get them developed, but scuba diving was awesome. We were the only group to see turtles, and they let us hold lots of different creatures.  He showed us some cool fish, and pointed out kinds of coral and things.  Landon was certified, so he had no problems.  I'm not gonna lie, having never dived before I was pretty terrified when my ears wouldn't equalize the pressure, and I breathed harder as I freaked out which made it worse because you can't breathe through your nose.  I probably shouldn't have gone while getting over a cold, since I've already had ear problems my whole life.  But once I got them to work, it was really cool.  My ears stopped hurting after a day or two.

With our cool diving guide.  I was glad we got him, he showed us a lot of cool stuff
and I think he was the nicest with my issues, ha.

Later that day we went boogie boarding, but there weren't any waves for the last three days of our trip, so it was kinda lame, but still fun.  Who would have thought, we go all the way to Hawaii to surf and boogie board and NO WAVES!

On Wednesday we went to Hanauma Bay to snorkel--which was amazing!  So many cool fish and turtles.  Interesting fact--this was once a volcano crater, and over time the water came in on that left side of the picture.  Now it is a federally protected area, and has lots of good reef area for snorkeling.  Beautiful beach too.

On Thursday we went to the Big Island, and Friday we got to go on a helicopter ride to see the volcano.  It was pretty awesome--the only active volcano in the world right now. I got pretty sick on the flight though, with my ears still weird, and the crazy helicopter motion, so it was probably more enjoyable for Landon.  They could only fly over the volcano vent for a couple seconds, but the whole ride was interesting.

In the area that was taken out by lava flow. They call this the road leading to nowhere.

The lava shelfs along the water, which can be dangerous and fall into the ocean, taking
any people around with it!

Macadamia nut farms.  We went through some of these on our zipline tour.

We went to Mauna Kea Beach which had beautiful sand and clear water.  We had two turtles come to play with us.  Landon even fed it a little from his hand.

He's pretty photogenic.  Just FYI, large tails mean they are male.

Doing some sand sculptures.  Mine was a mermaid, and Landon had a surfer in a wave.  Unfortunately, his wave caved in a couple times, so it was a long process :)

My boss told me we had to try the malasadas at this place, and
he was right. They were amazing!

We got to do a zipline adventure tour on the Big Island.  It was one of my favorite parts of the trip.  It went through rain forest, had views of the ocean, and the macadamia nut orchards.  They call those harnesses "wedgie suits"...

These macadamia nuts are still green.  They take 300 pounds of pressure to crack!

Eating some fresh guava picked off the tree. If you can't tell from my
face, it was a little sour.  As you can see on our helmets, we each had a tour nickname
for the guides.  I was "shorty" (which Landon like to think of as the gangster translation instead
height) and Landon was "zip stud".

At a black sand beach.  Landon posing on some lava rocks.

I came out to a camera. For some reason Landon felt the need to
document this part of the trip.

All along the road to Kona, there were white rocks spelling names and messages on the black lava rock.
We decided to stop and add our initials to them :)

We went to a farmer's market and bought a white pineapple--which is less acidic and sweeter than the yellow.
Delicious!  The lady was packing up and gave us some avocados (above--HUGE) and papaya as well.

Our hotel was on Banyan Tree Drive.  Each was named for someone famous.

Throughout the trip we also tried lots of different foods, like seafood, Thai food, Hawaiian, and this awesome Italian place.  We learned that our tolerance to spicy has gone down a lot, because we got the usual "Medium" on the Thai food, and both of us were sweatin' trying to eat it.  Along the trip there were interesting events, like the scary-looking lady who asked us to watch her bag at the airport right after the safety announcement warning to never do that. Or there was the chicken spam hidden in Landon's beef noodles (don't worry, we found it before he got too much).  Overall it was an awesome trip!  We love Hawaii!!!

I will post the underwater pics in a day or two.