Saturday, February 23, 2013

Hawaii (part 1)

After my last blog post we started getting ready for a 3 week vacation to Hawaii.  THREE WEEKS!  Can you believe it?  We are one lucky family.  It wouldn't have been possible without an amazing family in Hawaii that let us stay with them for 19 days!  

How do you blog about a 19 day vacation?  Especially when blogger doesn't make it easy to post pictures!  While we were in Hawaii I updated facebook almost daily for the sake of my family to see what we were doing there.  Facebook makes photo sharing SO easy!  

BUT . . . 
 I hate facebook.  Some wouldn't believe it with how much I am on there, but I am trying and hope to be on it less and less each day.  Some days I wish I would have never discovered facebook and hulu.  Both bring so much strife into my life!

SO . . . 

I am going to work on updating this blog and using this to be what it is for and stop using facebook as much to share with family. 

SO HERE GOES - 

When looking for airfare, we quickly realized another way to get to Hawaii a lot cheaper was to fly 
out of Las Vegas.  Flights out of SLC were $600 but out of Las Vegas we were able to get them for under $400! 
So we did the thing any normal, insanely frugal person would do and left our home for a 5 hour drive to Las Vegas. We saved over $600 doing it this way (with the cost of gas and hotel).  I still wonder if it was worth it or not, but my frugal husband says it was, so I guess I will agree!

Our flight left Las Vegas at 6:00 AM.  I though, eh, that's not so bad, 7:00 Utah time, kids are usually awake byt then anyway.  Little did I realize we had to be there at 4:30 AM and that meant waking up at 4:00 AM and the excitement meant I actually woke up at 3:30 AM!  Needless to say, it was a VERY long day!  Hawaii is a 2 hour difference and we didn't get to bed that night til about 10:00 PM, it was NUTS!

I didn't really take pictures of our first day in Hawaii.  We flew in around Noon, went to the house we were staying to drop off our luggage, and then went and met Cris's Uncle and Grandma.  It was the kids' first time meeting them.  We then went out to eat at a cute little restaraunt called Ramen Ya.  IT was ONOS!

One awesome thing about getting there was we had rented a small car (again, to keep costs smaller).  I was regretting it but we were already paying $600 for the small car, a van would have been over $1000.  Cris left us at the airport and got the car.  When he came back he was in a black van.  When he went to pick up the car, they asked him how many were in his party and upgraded us to a van!  It was the BIGGEST blessing for us!

Our first stop was La Perouse Bay.  To get there you have to drive as far as the road will take you.  It's a cute little area.  It's pretty rocky but was suppose to be a good snokeling spot.  It wasn't that great with the kids.  Snorkeling proved to be difficult with the kids but we were able to see some pretty cool things.

At this stop we all were injured in some way.  Cayten stepped on a sea urchin.  Did you know if you  step on a sea urchin you are suppose to pee on it?  We didn't.  When we got back to the Bechert's (the family we were staying with) Uncle told us.  Since we didn't pee on it, he had to soak his foot in vinegar to kill the part that was still stuck in his heel. It took a while to heal but he is all good now. Rysa slipped on some rocks and cut up her legs pretty good and Cris scraped up his ankle.  I think Carsyn got hurt somehow but I can't remember now.
Top Left: Carsyn did NOT LIKE the water at first - Top Middle - Cris holding a super small black crap - Top Right - Carsyn's view - Bottom Left - Cris walking with Carsyn - Bottom Right Cayten and Rysa attempting snorkeling for the first time.





The kids found MANY creatures here.  Mostly were hermit crabs.  They found some super small ones and some big ones!


OH MAN! This is going to be so much harder than I thought to blog about our trip! This is only part of day 1!  How do you blog about big family trips?

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