Back in February, we got to cash in on our Christmas gift from my parents: a week in Hawaii with no kids! It was seriously an amazing week, and went by much too quickly.
Josh’s mom and sister stayed with the girls the entire time we were gone, and took the best care of them. It made it much easier to leave them knowing that they were in such good hands. The girls had a blast, and I even came home to a clean house!
Our trip started off with a looooong drive down to Phoenix, where Sam and Nikki were dropping their kids off and we were flying out of. There was a huge accident on our way down that stalled us for over an hour. Then traffic getting into Phoenix was a nightmare. But the kids did a great job, and I had books to read so it was alright. When we got there, we dropped Sam and Nikki off with Nikki’s family and then headed to my Aunt Jayne and Uncle Paul’s house to have dinner with all of my AZ cousins and my grandparents. We certainly don’t make it down to AZ, well, ever, so it was super fun to see everyone and their families. I only wish it had been longer! Somehow, no pictures were taken – dang! We had a great time catching up.
We got up early the next morning and headed to the airport. After an uneventful flight, which included more reading, we got to Honolulu. It was pretty cloudy and rainy, and we had to take a second pass at landing at the airport. Luckily, that didn’t seem to be a problem second time around. We got on another plan to Maui, and took a short flight over. We got our suitcases and headed out to find the creeper van we would be driving around the week we were there. (It was awesome). My parents were there and had leis for us! We drove back to Kihei, where we stayed for the week.
We headed to the condos, and changed right into our swimsuits and headed down to the beach! My parents went to get everyone else from the airport, and Nikki and I watched while Josh and Sam frolicked in the water.
Once everyone got in, we grabbed some dinner at Fred’s – one of my parents favorite haunts (the fish tacos were amazing) and took a little stroll on the beach back to the condo. It was absolutely gorgeous.
Sunday morning we headed to church to go to sacrament meeting. After that, it was beach time!
Each couple rented a boogie board and a beach chair for the week, and it was perfect. We spent a lot of time in the water that day (and with the thrashing I took all week long from boogie boarding, this baby is meant to be for surviving that!) I don’t think I’ve giggled like that in a long time. It was just fun and hilarious.
And yet another beautiful sunset.
On Monday, we decided to hit the beach in the morning, and then headed out to La Perouse Bay to do some snorkeling. It was quite a drive to get there on some very windy and narrow roads, but also some great volcanic scenery.
It wasn’t super warm, and I ended up ruining it for everyone. Let me just say that I was already having anxiety about snorkeling. I have no idea why; I’ve done it multiple times before. But for some reason, I was struggling a little bit. The water was super murky, which just added to my panic. Basically it was a lot of really fast breathing. The rocks jutted out of the water quite a bit, and as I turned to go back where I thought I had just come from, I ran into something. I thought it had just been a rock and kept swimming. One or two minutes later I look down and realize that there are sea urchin spines sticking out of my leg. Not a rock that I ran into, a sea urchin. I start shouting at Josh to come to me, and he tries to pull the spines out while we are in the water. It is moving us too much so we decide we need to head back to shore. We get back, and I can’t even look at my leg. It looked like the spines were growing out of my leg. There were probably about 30 of them. My dad had looked up what to do, and we tried to pull them out, but they are barbed and basically just broke off. It was disgusting.
I wish I would have calmed down a bit to get a better picture of them, but that was the best one we got. And this is what it looked like immediately afterwards.
We decided to forgo instacare, and went to the grocery store to buy some cotton pads and vinegar. Apparently vinegar will help to dissolve the spines. After we got that, we went to Ululani’s for a shave ice to try to salvage the afternoon a bit. We went back to the condos to clean up, and then wrapped vinegar soaked pads around my leg with saran wrap. After that it was off to get cheeseburgers – another one of my parents favorite places to eat!
The restaurant was located in a semi-outdoor mall type shopping area. This was probably the time that my leg hurt the worst. I think it was the poison working it’s way out, and it was seriously painful. I could barely put pressure on my leg to walk around. I was quite the gimp. My muscle would seize up a bunch when I was walking around. I dealt with this to varying degrees over the next couple of days, but for sure this nite was the worst. That’ll teach me!
The next day we kind of did whatever we wanted to. Some people hit the beach, we ended up walking around a bit and looking through some stores. Later that afternoon, we ended up going on a whale watching tour. We found an amazing deal and figured we might as well. Locals had been saying that it was like ‘whale soup’ with how many whales were around. They weren’t kidding! The guide on the boat told us that we had been ‘Maui mugged’. Which was pretty accurate! We saw SO many whales – mamas with babies, and males fighting for females – it was incredible. There were times when our boat was basically surrounded by whales. We saw some amazing things, and it was well worth our money!
That takes us about halfway through the trip!
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