20 Year Trip - Part 5

FaceTiming with our babies...

We dedicated one day completely to checking out various beaches on the island.

Our first stop was snorkeling at Hanauma Bay.

I have zero pictures of this experience.  Water makes me nervous.  I love boating but actually putting my face in the water is another story.  

My definition of boating = watching my kids have fun in the water and wake boarding, me and the kids riding on the tube and NOT getting thrown off.  

My friend Amy took great pictures of Hanauma Bay so you can check them out.  Amy, maybe you and I could take adult swim lessons one day.  It seems we both have similar feelings about the water :)

I snorkeled 5 years ago in Kauai but it was like I had never snorkeled before and Kever had to walk me through it.  He finally convinced me I could float and to calm down and so I did and had a great time floating around the bay looking at all the fish...until I saw an Eel and then I was done.

Kevin went farther out than I did and saw all kinds of huge amazing colorful fish.

Kev and I make a pretty good team with the vacation thing.  I do all the booking and scheduling and he gets into the details.  He read that if you go REALLY early to Hanauma Bay you'll miss the crowds and crowds of people.  He also read that if you are there with the crowds the water gets really murky because of all the sand that gets kicked up in the water and it can be wall to wall people when you are trying to snorkel.  So we got there at around 6:30am when the park opened.  We did not have to fight the crowds, we also got to skip the movie they show you before you go out and instead had a 1 minute summary of the movie from a park employee.  We also found out that at 6:30am there is no one there to collect the parking fee or the park fee so we saved a few bucks there too :)

After Beach #1 we were starving so we consulted yelp! for a place to eat breakfast.  People raved about a little hole in the wall called Ray's Cafe.  It was literally a hole-in-the-wall.  Check out the menu.  There were random posters with handwritten menu items.  The reviews mostly raved about their $15. prime rib and fried chicken.  Since it was 9am we went with the Portuguese omelet and french toast.  It was pretty good but not as good as Papa Ole's.  There were people there, at 9am eating the prime rib.  Crazy.  (PS We are done with Portuguese sausage for a while--it is delicious, but in small doses :)

We actually did not stop at this beach but I liked the name of it.

I lost count how many beaches we did stop at and I forgot what most of them were called.

 Lots of big waves and lots of surfers (didn't get any pictures of them though).  The surfers were fun to watch!  Great people watching in general.  Our favorite was the almost naked lady running on the beach.

Since we were passing the Dole Plantation we figured might as well get another Pineapple Whip.  The husband totally rocks the Hawaiian shirts doesn't he!

Trying to drain the water out of his ears from snorkeling.

We found some great shade at this beach so we stayed here the longest.  We read our book and just watched the surfers and whales.

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We thought we'd check out the Turtle Bay public beach.

We weren't all that impressed.

But on the other side of the resort the view was beautiful!

Kev was on a mission to find us the perfect view for the sunset and he totally nailed it.  We sat on one of the life guard stations reading until the sun set...

I'll post the Hawaii finale tomorrow.