Several months ago JR informed me that his next Sport Psychology conference was going to be in Hawaii and I was like "Ok, well if it HAS to be in Hawaii I SUPPOSE I'll go with you but you'll really owe me buddy" Perhaps being in a conference all day is not the most ideal way to spend your time while in Hawaii but hey, I didn't have to go to the conference ;) JR is the sucker who agreed to that! (Don't worry, he loved every minute of it.) We flew in to Honolulu on a Wednesday and spent our first couple hours toting our luggage around town waiting to be able to check in to our hotel. For those of you who have had to tote luggage around town for a couple hours you'll remember how awkward and uncomfortable this can be. I'd love to say that we stayed in a 5 star hotel on the beach but in reality we stayed in a 2 1/2 star hotel a few blocks from the beach. The view was pretty amazing from our room though!
).
What I wouldn't give to wake up to that every morning!
While JR spent most of his day in his conference I walked around Waikiki beach and went shopping and resort hopped. JR's conference was at the Sheraton Waikiki which just so happened to have some of the best poolside amenities I could find so even though I wasn't a guest at that hotel I decided I was close enough seeing as how JR WAS at a conference there. That counts right? Man, I loved that pool so much. It overlooked the ocean and had floating bean bag chairs to lounge in. It was like you were in the ocean but without having to get all sandy. *sigh* I miss it. Having to hang out by myself wasn't my favorite, neither was having to take pictures of myself. That is much more awkward than toting luggage around town. I'd try to wait for all the people to go by and then take the picture so no one would be like "look at that girl taking pictures of herself" Then again wherever I post those pictures I run the risk of people thinking "She must really love herself because she took so many pictures of herself" I just wanted to get SOME pictures of me in Hawaii, geesh!
Being the cheapo's that we are we ate at a mall food court almost every meal. Sad? I think so. Don't judge. If we had money we'd be staying in the Sheraton! JR was off most days by mid afternoon so we got to hang out at night. We did a lot of walking since the first 2 days we had no transportation. On Friday we splurged and rented mopeds. So much fun! At least it was fun once I figured out how to use it and no longer thought I was going to tip over and die. I was pretty shaky starting out and honestly thought I might just take a lap around the block and return the dang thing. I persevered though and we ended up driving up around Diamond Head and to Hanauma Bay. My favorite part was that eye wear was required and JR had lost his sun glasses so rather than spending an extra $10 for new glasses he actually bought pool goggles in an attempt to save money because it was the cheapest thing he could find. He wore those goggles proudly.
It was about this point that I realized our camera lens quit working and everything was too blurry to be recognizable so sadly we had to resort to the other camera we had brought which just so happened to be an underwater disposable camera. Needless to say our pictures from this day on were not the best quality. And just for the record, this is the 2nd major trip we've taken that our camera has died on us. The first being our honeymoon. We don't have the best camera track record.
Some of the views from the moped ride:
Is that sand on his face? Oh wait, nope, it's his beard.
We had to be back by 7:30 to take the mopeds back and JR was supposed to be catching a shuttle to the airport to pick up our rental car but we were running a little behind and traveling on the highway at night on little mopeds was a bit scary so he missed his shuttle. Poor JR then spent a couple hours running up and down the Waikiki strip trying to find another random shuttle to take. It did not help that his phone was dead at this point. This was the night where JR was taking me out for my birthday dinner but with all of the delays he didn't pick me up until about 9:45 but when he did pick me up he rolled up in this:
Finger /\
Food /\
Sunday we went to church and drove back to the north shore (because it was that wonderful) and walked around the temple and sunset beach. The church building we went to was very unique because it had a mosaic on the side of the building which you never see in LDS churches. I had to double check to make sure we were at the right place.
\/ finger
We caught the red eye out that night and then Hawaii was gone. Sad sad day. Here are some more pictures for you so you can linger on longer to Hawaii like I wish I could have done:
Ha Ha \/
JR says it looks like I have a Mr. Peanut spectacle on here
If you made it this far, thanks for sharing our Hawaii memories with us!
