Island Fever

I was warned that when you go to Hawaii you come back with 'island brain' and you're not the same for a while! Let me just say that I am feeling it. I just keep thinking about how fun our trip was and when we can go back. I need to blog about it while everything is still fresh on my mind. I will probably break these posts down into a couple days at a time since there are so many pictures I want to post and write about.

We have been talking about going to Hawaii ever since we got married and Jon promised me that he would take me before our ten year anniversary which is this December. Everything fell into place and we were able to spend eight days in Oahu last week.

We flew in on a Sunday afternoon and headed over to the Punch Bowl which is the military cemetary where a lot of veterans are buried.

The walls on the sides of this monument had the names of all of the soldiers whose bodies were never recovered. At the top they had mosaics of all of the major battles in the Pacific during WWII.

We spent a lot of time walking around the cemetary and looking at everything. It was really humbling to see how many people have sacrificed for our freedom. We are truly grateful.

We then made it over to our hotel. We stayed at the JW Marriott at Ko Olina over on the west side of the island. The hotel was really nice and we liked being more secluded and away from the busy city of Honolulu. This was the view from our room. We watched this sunset our first night and then went to dinner at the hotel. We were starving!

After dinner we found a Target just a couple miles from our hotel. This made the trip complete! We bought cereal and milk and some snacks and lots of chocolate covered macadamia nuts. I think we ate 10 boxes of those throughout the week which may or may not have contributed to each of our five pound weight gains!

Monday morning I woke up early and couldn't go back to sleep, so I just layed out on the balcony and read my book while I listened to the ocean. It was so peaceful and I knew right there that this was going to be a great trip! Once Jon got up we headed over to the Dole Plantation and got some delicious fresh fruit and pinaeapple Dole whips. I get them at Disneyland a lot, but there's something better about eating them in Hawaii!

We then walked through the largest maze in the world (or so they say). Notice the excitement on my face- I really love mazes! Nathan shares my excitement and has been talking about going to the 'Hawaii maze' ever since we told him about it. We told him we'll take him when he is 10 years old!

We then headed up to the North Shore and took a beautiful walk through the Waimea Valley which ended at this waterfall. (For those of you Lost fans, this is the waterfall that Kate and Hurley were found in when they came back to the island!)

We were able to swim out to the waterfall which was one of my favorite things that we did. There's just something cool about swimming in a waterfall! It was pretty cold, though!

Not sure what Jon's towel is doing in this picture!

Jon loved these trees that are all over the island.

We then went over to the beach up at North Shore and watched the surfers surfing the huge waves. It's pretty amazing to watch how good- and crazy- they are.

On our way home from Waimea Bay we stopped in a little town called Haleiwa and got some of their famous shaved ice. I'm not usually a shaved ice fan, but it was really good. They put vanilla ice cream on the bottom and you can never go wrong with ice cream!

I loved the cute containers they put them in!

That night we walked around our hotel and then headed into Waikiki for dinner. We thought this statue was interesting- we could see it from our balcony, but we never figured out the story behind it. I guess it will remain a mystery!

We ate at a pretty good restaurant on the beach in Waikiki. I started liking the taste of coconut a little more while we were there and actually liked it in my smoothies and shaved ice. I still can't handle the texture of it, though. So gross!

After dinner we walked around some of the shops and then headed back to our hotel and went to bed early. We still hadn't adjusted to the time change and so at 10:00 there it was like 1:00 in the morning for us and we were tired!

Stay tuned for more...