Hawaii - July 3

The North Shore was nice, but I didn't think it was fabulous. Maybe it's very popular because it's not as crowded as other parts of the island. Although I bet it's more crowded when the surf is higher. It was pretty, but I didn't think it was fabulous. Shark's Cove was nice, but very rocky, so no real swimming.
I couldn't really snorkel because I couldn't see where to put my hands without my contacts in and I didn't want to put my hands down on a sea urchin and get stung. Hubby and Uncle Hooter went snorkeling out into the open water outside the cove, and Keeper Boy and J-Mav had a great time snorkeling within the cove. They LOVED snorkeling. I got fried from standing in the shallow water with Princess P and the younger boys, but it doesn't hurt.

We ate lunch at Macky's shrimp truck. Good shrimp! I originally wrote here that it probably wasn't worth $40 for three plates; however, I later reconsidered that as we spent that (or more) on almost any meal we ate out because of the cost of things on the islands. Something else we can say we did while we were here! We saw the famous shave ice place in the North Shore, too... Matsimoto's or something like that. Didn't stop though.

We also went to the Dole Plantation and saw how pineapples grow (who knew that they grow on bushes in the ground... we all thought they grew on trees!). We also had some of the famous Dole whip (pineapple ice cream). YUMMY! We have since discovered that the new yogurt place in our subdivision has pineapple yogurt (and coconut yogurt) that tastes EXTREMELY similar to what we had at the Dole Plantation. This could be bad... In addition, we saw a gecko hanging out on a beautiful red plant and got to see some Rainbow Eucylypus Trees up close and personal.


We ate at home last night after watching the sun set at Sharks Cove. Got some great pictures, I think. (I did.)



Today we went to three look-outs. The first one--Lenai Lookout--was amazing!! We climbed around on rocks and took some cool pictures.



The second one was Blow Hole Lookout. The tide was too low for the hole to be blowing, but we saw the beach where the famous scene in From Here to Eternity was filmed. It was very pretty.

Then we went to a lighthouse lookout.

Tonight we had our photos taken on the beach at Paradise Cove (where we had been a few nights ago for the luau). Hopefully there are some good ones. The sunset was beautiful! A friend of Jenna's who is also an unemployed nurse and does photography on the side did the photos. She left the next day for a three-week vacation on the mainland, so we won't see the photos until sometime in August.