Hawaii

James and I celebrated our 25th anniversary in December. This past September, we were out to dinner and got talking about how, in almost 25 years of marriage we had never really been on a vacation just the two of us.  We had been camping and things with the kids, and I had gone to the Beach with my mom. There was the time in October 2012, when he was away out of state driving truck long haul, that I flew down to SLC and spent a week with him in his truck.  We went to South Carolina and to Texas to see Meghan and Ryan's boot camp graduations.  But no actual vacations. 

The 25 year anniversary seemed like a land mark, so we talked about how we should go on vacation, just the 2 of us. Someplace warm. We both wanted to go to Hawaii and before I knew it, we were sitting there in the restaurant making plane, hotel, and car reservations. The week of our anniversary, tickets were really expensive, so we searched for the soonest relatively cheap fares and settled on January 6-13. We were going to Hawaii!! The 3+ months between took forever and we were constantly telling ourselves to hang on because although life was crazy, in a little while, we were going to Hawaii. And so we did.

And oh my gosh, we had so much fun!!! 

We got there at 10 pm on Saturday the 6th, and I had to take my hoodie off as soon as I was off the plane. We got to the hotel and our room was FREEZING, because the housekeeping staff had left the A/C on all day. We had a big sliding glass door out to our lanai though, and we turned the A/C off, opened the door, and were then quite comfortable. We played this game with housekeeping all week, leaving the door open when we left, then having to open it again and turn off the A/C when we would come back every day, LOL. 

I ran every morning, and got lots of miles in. The first few days I really struggled to maintain my pace, I think because I'm not used to the heat and humidity, but by the end of the week I had adjusted pretty well. I wound up with a lot of soaking wet stinky running clothes though. I ran around the base of Diamond Head one morning:

did hill repeats on it once:

 ran on the path beside the beach:

 and through Waikiki:

I ate seafood every day. I had lots of shrimp, tried seared ahi (only cooked on the outside, very tasty), and poke (yum):

I had fresh pineapple (completely delicious), fresh coconut (blech), dragon fruit (which was prettier than it was tasty), and two different kinds of small, local bananas.

We snorkeled:

  laid on the beach in the sun:

hiked:

 drove around the coast:

and watched fire dancers:

Really, we had a fabulous time. And we enjoyed the warm weather so much, we wound up having long discussions about whether we could move there. That's still undetermined,  LOL.  But we are definitely going back. I think we will visit the Big Island next.