Tropical Paradise

We are now home from our vacation, which was soooo nice; I will just post a brief update about our activities.

We flew out of Minneapolis the morning of February 22nd and spent the whole day either flying or waiting in airports and arrived in Honolulu, Hawaii at 9:20 pm local time, 1:20 am central time.  Needless to say, we were exhausted and crashed in bed as soon as we got into our room.

When planning our activities, I figured a full day of travel would wear us out, so we didn’t do much our first day.  We mostly explored Waikiki Beach (which is where our hotel was), did a little driving around in the convertible in Honolulu, then went to a luau in the evening at Paradise Cove.

The view from the balcony of our hotel room.

David and I on the beach at the luau.  We learned a lot about ancient Hawaiian culture and cuisine.

The most beautiful sunset we saw was during the luau.

The next day we went to Pearl Harbor and took a city tour.  We learned a lot about the events leading up to and resulting in the attack on December 7, 1941.  We also visited several historic landmarks throughout our tour.

An anchor from the USS Arizona, weighing 10 tons.  It was huge, but in comparison to the ship, it is actually very small.

This is the National Cemetery in Punchbowl Crater (a volcano).

Day three was spent touring the southeastern portion of the island, both along the coast and through the mountain jungle.

One of hundreds of pictures of the ocean.

A view from the mountains at Pali Highway Lookout.

Our fourth day we did some hiking, a helicopter tour of the same area we had toured by bus the previous two days, and a sunset dinner cruise.  In hindsight, we should have done the helicopter tour first.  This day was quite hazy due to smoke from a volcano on another island; our view was still great, but the pictures didn’t turn out quite as well.

Diamond Head from the helicopter.  This was also the volcano crater we hiked that morning, to the tallest peak in the picture.

The ATV tour we took through the most popular movie filming area on the island was the highlight of day number five.  The ranch where everything was filmed encompasses all types of terrain as well as coast line.  We also took a jungle tour on the ranch, then drove the coast to the north shore, and continued our drive through the middle of the island and past the Dole plantation.

A picture of the jungle portion of the ranch.  The picture of the valley where the ATV tour was is on David’s phone and I haven’t had a chance to put them on the computer yet.

The Bonsai Pipeline on the north shore, the most treacherous beach on the island.  The picture doesn’t do justice to the size of the waves.

The sixth day was our final day, we spent time at several different beaches that we had visited throughout the week (I love the ocean) and drove back to the Pali Highway lookout to do some hiking that one of the locals recommended.  After a long day outside, we flew back to the mainland, about 9:40 pm (local time) and arrived back in Minneapolis at 5:00 pm the following day. 

We spent the night in the Cities and slowly made our way home later that afternoon after the weather cleared some.  We ended up staying at David’s parents that night.  Today we made it the rest of the way home.  Vacation is wonderful, but so is home.