Hawaii

Finally!! Here's my Hawaii post. I'll try to keep the descriptions brief, as there are sooo many pictures(and this is only a tiny tiny portion...)

We left Wednesday morning with our good friends from college, Burke and Amber. My sister Shannon, and her husband Jed were so awesome and watched our kids all week(thank you!!). We flew to the island of Oahu and stayed at the Hilton Grand Vacations in Honolulu. I wasn't to impressed with Honolulu right away...it's too city-like. But we were very pleased with our hotel. This was the view that greeted us from our balcony:



We then stocked up on groceries at Food Land and came back to have dinner at Benihana...yummm...
Here's Burke and Amber:
We went back to our room and the boys decided to go for a little swim. The next morning we headed up to Laie to the LDS Temple, BYU, and the Polynesian Cultural Center. This is my favorite picture from the whole trip - it's by the parking lot for the temple: I actually tried not to post too many of the scenic pictures because we took a LOT, but I couldn't resist the above pic. I might do another post of all the cool plants and beautiful island, but this post has way too many pictures already.



After the temple we had a picnic at a beach just north of the temple and PCC. The boys got some more snorkeling in while Amber and I got some sun. The only pictures I got from this beach were of this cool boat. :)
After lunch we headed over to the PCC:

Ian scored a hat made from coconut tree leaves that gave us plenty of laughs:

We ate too much(no I am not pregnant):

The next day we spent on the west side of the island, mostly on the North Shore(which is actually the Northwest shore, but whatever). First we popped into the Dole Plantation and had some fresh pineapple and Dole Whips...yum. Someone there pointed out that Ian looked like a pineapple, himself. We concurred.

After that we went to Waimea Valley Audubon center and saw TONS of gorgeous plants. Amber is the tiny thing at the bottom of this huge tree:

For you LOST watchers, this is the waterfall that Sawyer and Kate swam in and found the dead bodies strapped into airplane seats with the suitcase. Creepy. But very nice.

After our mile and a half walk we'd worked up an appetite and Amber had read about an awesome shrimp shack: Romy's *drool*

We brought our shrimp to Shark Cove:

And had a great time snorkeling. We only had about 1/2 hour of snorkeling but it was great!
We had to rush back through traffic to make it to our sunset dinner sailboat cruise. By the time we got there the boys were exhausted.
Here's the view of our hotel from the boat. Ours is the one in the middle left, just above the white sailboat.

I think someone spiked our drinks because we got a little loopy on the boat:



We watched an awesome sunset...

And our hotel put on some fireworks...
Here's the boat we went on:
The next morning we woke up early and headed over to Hanauma Bay for the best snorkeling spot in Oahu. We defied death quite a few times and made it out with each person having at least 1 battle wound...but great snorkeling! I still have to develop the underwater camera pics.
We went back to the hotel for lunch. Then the guys went golfing and Amber and I went shopping. That night we split up to go on dates. Ian and I had what Ian described as "The best service I've ever had in my entire life." And he was serious. That waiter was so awesome. We even spoke to the manager about him because he was so great. I love Hawaii!

On our last day we hit up the swap meet and Pearl Harbor. Both Ian and Burke took WAY too many photos, so here's the Reader's Digest version:



Sorry for the huge onslaught of pictures, but I had to put them all since I'm a slacky scrapbooker. We had such an amazing time. Ian was ready to move there. I was ready to go home and kiss my babies, and then move there as a family. Thanks, Jardines, for a super fun vacation! We couldn't have gone with a better couple! Mahalo!! (Or, as Amburger says, Maloha! *jinx, you owe me a coke*)