Hawaii 2012

This past week we went to Oahu with my family! Our flight left at 3:30PM on Thursday the 16th and landed in Hawaii late that night. We stayed in this beautiful rental home three houses down from the beach on the North Shore.



This is the home where we stayed! Fabulous, eh?!

Day 1-
We went to the Laie Temple and the Polynesian Cultural Center. We did the Ambassador tour and got to see all the cool country representations. The luau at the end of the night was my favorite. Lots of good food!! The purple tarot rolls were the best.







Day 2-
We spent the first half of the day at the beach by the house we were staying at. We watched lots of surfers catch the huge waves, buried eachother in the sand, and when it came time to leave we almost couldn't get my dad to leave the water! He was having too much fun "body surfing". A random black dog also adopted us for the day and hung out for a few hours.





Later that day we went to the Dole Pineapple Plantation. We enjoyed walking around seeing all the cool scenery and had a delicious pineapple whip! Mmm...If I thought I could smuggle some home without it melting I would have.



Day 3-
Sunday we went to church in Kahuku. Everyone was super nice and introduced themselves to us while we were there. We felt very welcome and had a great sacrament meeting. Later that day we went snorkeling at Turtle Bay! We took a video with our "GoPro" camera, so I will have to upload that and see if it turned out cool! We specifically bought the camera with this trip in mind, so hopefully it is neat.





Day 4-
On our last day we went to Pearl Harbor. It was probably one of my personal favorite parts of the trip. No one in my family had ever been, and Riley hadn't been for a long time. We did the full tour so we got to tour through the USS Missouri (AKA the Mighty Mo), the USS Arizona, and the USS Bowfin submarine. It was such a neat experience! Those ships are HUGE and really gave me a new perspective on the whole thing.

One thing that I thought was really interesting was that even after 70 years the USS Arizona is still leaking oil to the surface. You can see that in the picture.





Before we left for the airport on our last night we spent some time walking around Waikiki. We walked through the area of beach by where our hotel was the last time we visited Oahu.




We had a great experience spending some time in the warm weather. Riley is seriously considering letting me transfer to BYU-Hawaii ;) Thanks for the trip Mom and Dad! We'll definitely be back!

PS-Shrimp Chips, although they must be quite popular because they are sold at every convenience store/roadside stand/gas station, are NOT good.