Waipio Valley

I do believe our visit to Waipio Valley was the first of multiple confirmations that I sweat way more than Dave.  I'm a sweaty sweaterton.  We went against my mom's advice to NOT hike down to this black sand beach.  She told me, "I'm warning you, don't do it.  It's one mile down and ten miles up."  Well.  Indeed, it was super steep, but we were expecting it because she told us so it was actually a lot of fun.  I like sweating when I'm working for it!

This is the lookout point with the black sand beach below:

You can see a waterfall coming down the cliff:

We decided the view was great, but we wanted to go check it out up close and personal.

So we're walkin' along, walkin' along...

...taking in the sites-- looking at the cool flowers...

Oooo, look!  The leaves have those cool holes!

Neato!

And then I saw a gnarly looking spider:

I took a few pictures of it, but had too many heebie jeebies to carry on so Dave took almost all of these awesome spider pictures you are about to behold.

If you follow the barrel of the lens you can see the spider/it's size.  I'm not saying it's an enormous tarantula.  I'm just saying we saw a gnarly looking spider and took a bunch of pictures of it because we like pictures and think they are cool and fun to have.

I like the little guy at the top in this one!

Take a good look at these if you can-- you can see some amazing stuff, including the silk coming out of the spider!

All of those are so cool, but they literally make me shudder.

Moving on down the road:

Hawaii is incredible.  There is so much variety of terrain and scenery!  Black and volcanic, green and mossy, snowy and frozen, hilly, different kinds of trees and on and on.  It's so cool.

Too bad this picture is out of focus-- this tree is crazy cool!  This was a swampy part of our trek and there were mosquitoes galore, so it was a quick snap and run.  Aw, snap.  Don't hate.  (Remind me to tell you the story of  "Aw, snap" and "Don't hate" someday.)

We made it!  Going down was nothing.  It was just steep and a little slippery from a little bit of rain and I was sweaty because I sweat a lot.

Black sand.

Sexy people, everywhere!

Pictures really don't do this justice-- the vegetation covered cliffs shooting straight up, way up, and a little forest of sorts before you got to the rocks and then the beach.  It was cool.

This picture also does not do justice to just how steep our hike up was.

It rained on us just about the whole way up so we were nice and wet!  It was totally fun and a good memory maker!

Mauna Kea

Our first adventure in Hawaii was the Mauna Kea Observatory.  It was FREEZING up there!  I don't know how cold it really was, but man, it felt incredibly cold and I just had a wimpy hoodie.  It's the highest point in Hawaii at 13,803 ft.  On the way up, we passed pick up truck after pick up truck with their beds totally full of snow.  I have no earthly idea what they do with it, but it was quite popular!  We took in the top-of-the-world views, caught the sunset and stayed for the stars.  Very cool and very cold.  

Almost all the pictures are from the same vantage point because there was a bunch of photographers set up on tripods, so we got our spot and stayed in it.  I wussed out and sat in the car for a while every now and again.  It was so cold!  So Dave took a lot of these pictures.

Dave, super cold.

It was a bit too cloudy for the sunset to be awesome.  That was kind of a bummer, but it was still beautiful.

That's snow blowing.

We tried to set up the tripod for some stars in the cold and dark... waaaaay better than the last time we tried.  

Also, by the way, the first things we noticed when we got to Hawaii at like 11pm were:

-The sky was clear and you could actually see stars!

-It wasn't flat!

-The roads were smooth!

Those are things you can only truly appreciate if you live in Houston where you never see stars, it's totally flat and the roads are like a roller coaster with pot holes galore.  Looooove it.

The Coolest Airplane Ever

Back in February, DAVE AND I WENT TO HAWAII.  Oh my goodness, it was the greatest thing I've ever done.  It was the first time in our 8.5 years of marriage that we've taken a trip, just the two of us.  Vacation is so awesome!  I hope we can take trips together more than once every 8.5 years moving forward!

As you can imagine, I have a billion pictures from our trip, so I'll be putting up multiple posts about the best time of my life lately.

Gotta start with the airplane.  Took pictures for Miles so he could see how awesome this airplane was.  The whole first 5 minutes I thought of him and how utterly delighted he would be.  It was a United "dream jet" or something.  It was seriously the coolest airplane ever.  I felt like any or all of the following at some point (or all at the same time) of the flight:

1. A kid

2. A first time flyer

3. A first time visitor to the U.S.

4. A visitor to the future

5. Someone who had lived in the sticks all their life and never seen or used modern amenities and then got on a crazy cool airplane and had their mind BLOWN.  So I guess I sort of felt Amish.

Check out the windows.  No shades?  No problem!  They TINT at the push of a button! 

Whaaaat?!?!  So cool!

All the seats had a touch screen tv-- movies and shows galore, free for the watching.  Dave and I watched The Internship-- separate, but together.

Dave, in awe and amazement.  You used the screen to control your light and a bunch of other stuff.  At one point we saw a guy reaching up and touching/pushing on his light trying to turn it off... that was funny.

We felt bad for the guy sitting next to us as we were touching everything and tinting the window, un-tinting the window, tinting the window medium, lighter, darker, lighter, darker, medium... WOW... take a picture!  

We felt even more bad, though, when we had to say goodbye to that airplane once we got to LA and had to get on the crappiest silver bullet you've ever seen.  We also had to change airlines, which means we had to walk all over LAX and outside (the weather was lovely and you could see the mountains!  Mountains look so much grander after you live in Texas.), go through security again and get to our gate with hardly enough time to buy an outrageously overpriced organic (said in a I'm-so-fancy-I'm-organic voice) muffin.

Then we flew to Hawaii!  I can't remember if I slept that flight... I'm pretty sure I did, and Dave got bumped by every bloody person who ever walked by to go to the bathroom or stretch their legs and had a pretty annoying flight on that crappy silver bullet.  Haha, fun times.